


Choi Beomgyu And The Uncanny Magic-User's Club

by TheSwingbyJeanHonoreFragonard



Category: TOMORROW X TOGETHER | TXT (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Comedy, Fluff, M/M, Magical Realism, Teen Romance, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29121381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSwingbyJeanHonoreFragonard/pseuds/TheSwingbyJeanHonoreFragonard
Summary: Without really meaning to, Beomgyu joins the weirdest club on campus.
Relationships: Choi Beomgyu/Choi Soobin
Comments: 34
Kudos: 122





	Choi Beomgyu And The Uncanny Magic-User's Club

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magnoliafilms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnoliafilms/gifts), [tuanpark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuanpark/gifts).



**Tuesday, 3:28 PM.**

One Tuesday afternoon, on an oddly warm, sunny day in late April, Choi Beomgyu discovered an indisputable truth about the world and his place in it as soon as he slid open the classroom door.

“Oh, I’ve got the wrong room.”

This was such a profound observation because he thought he had the Chess Club’s room. 

In fact, he was absolutely positive that he had the Chess Club’s room. Under no circumstances should this be any room  _ except _ the Chess Club’s room because this was the third door on the right once you get to the top of the east stairs which, and this goes without saying, was the Chess Club’s room. He’d been in Chess Club the whole semester and had met in this (well not  _ this _ , but still this) room every Tuesday and Friday since February so how on earth did he have the wrong room? How was that possible?

How had he slipped up so bad?

He was a transfer student, yeah, and he still wasn’t used to being on a campus this large, yeah, and he’d yet to complete his first full semester here, yeah, but that didn’t mean he was bad at this. It’s not like he got  _ lost _ .

So if he wasn’t lost, what were the alternative reasons?

Hmmm. It was not like the room had been redecorated or some other simple, conflict-resolving explanation like that. No. Everything that was supposed to be familiar was just… wrong. The blackboard was to his left instead of to his right, like it was supposed to be. None of the desks were arranged in chess-playing clusters around the edge of the room but instead were in a set of disorganized, crooked rows. The posters and assignment listings and announcement boards were on different parts of the walls than what he was used to. Even the air smelled slightly different, felt slightly thicker, smelled slightly sweeter. Like someone had brought cookies. Most importantly of all, though, there was no sign of any of Beomgyu’s fellow club members or even his club advisor.

There were just these three random dudes instead.

Somehow, through some great mishap on his part, through some wild cognitive error, Beomgyu really had walked into the wrong classroom.

“I’m gonna go,” he muttered. More to himself than to the room’s pitifully low number of occupants. Must be a super niche club.

“Oh, don’t leave just yet,” said one of the boys in a cheerful voice. He snapped closed the large book he was reading. “Stay.”

“No,” said Beomgyu flatly. Anything but that.

The boy with the book frowned. “But you’re here for a reason, aren’t you?”

“I’m not, actually,” Beomgyu replied.

A second boy asked him, “Are you here to join our club?”

Beomgyu shook his head. “Nope.” Anything but that!

The second boy responded, “We could use a fifth!” Then he pulled a cookie off of the tray on the desk in front of him and bit into it. “We’ll keep struggling without a fifth.”

Didn’t the guy hear him? Beomgyu stated, “I’m not here to join your club.” And how could he be their fifth when he only saw three of them?

The studious-looking boy with the book spoke up, “Five is, like, a super important number. I’ve always liked it. It’s nice and solid. Like a house’s foundation. There’s something about the structure of it… Something about the vibrations it gives off.”

“Oh? Now you’re making me like it even more,” said the second boy, stuffing another cookie in his mouth even though he was hardly done with the first.

This was perplexing. Although Beomgyu had no plans on giving up Chess Club anytime soon to join any other after school club, and even though Beomgyu knew he would absolutely, without a doubt, instantly regret finding out the answer to his question, he asked anyway, “What club is this?”

The third boy, sitting at a desk near an open window with a head full of school-regulation-breaking dyed blue hair, propped his chin on his hand and said, like it was nothing, “The Uncanny Magic-Users Club.”

Yeah. Instant regret.

Beomgyu never ever should have asked. He never should have let himself think that this was the Calculus Club or the Animal Conservation Club or something like that. He let that obnoxiously long club name sit in his head for approximately 2.533 seconds before promptly discarding it. “I’ve definitely got the wrong room,” he reiterated. Then he did what he probably should have done as soon as he walked in: he turned around to leave.

But perhaps the barrage of questions the other boys had hurled at him had only been a distraction to delay him and trap him because a fourth boy (the guy had to have been leaning against the wall next to the door or something!) shifted his weight into Beomgyu’s path and the two of them bodily collided.

“Do you have a problem,” the tall boy asked with a wide, toothy grin.

Beomgyu grit his teeth, ready for a fight. He snapped, “You’re the one who walked into  _ me _ !”

“No, no,” the tall guy waved a hand in innocence. “I mean, do you have a problem? We solve problems, you see. It’s what we’re good at. Is this a magical situation? Is this a case of something Uncanny?”

Beomgyu just stared blankly at the dude. He’d heard every word out of the guy’s mouth clearly but that didn’t mean he understood those words. Who knew that there could be such large gaps in communication even when you both knew the same language? If anything, Beomgyu understood things even less upon hearing such sentences strung together. Had this seemingly normal dude seriously just asked if this was a  _ magical _ problem? As if magic was real? Beomgyu must have wandered into the Anime Nerd Club. “I’m out,” he declared. He held up two fingers. “Deuces.” He then attempted to step around the boy and leave the room.

The tall boy raised an arm and blocked his path. He smiled cheerfully down his long, slender nose at Beomgyu as if showing off his teeth would somehow lower the mild hostility in his actions.

Beomgyu looked over his shoulder. “Are you guys okay? Do I need to go?” He was already trying to go, but still.

“That’s actually a good idea. I say we  _ all _ go,” said the blue-haired boy next to the window. The way he had been folded up at the desk with his legs bent beneath him had made him look small, but now that he was standing, he was quite intimidatingly tall. “You keep saying that you have the wrong room so we will help you find the correct room.” 

The one eating the cookies piped up, “We’ll call it The Case Of The Misplaced Club Room. Can’t have a mystery without a good case name.”

The guy with the large book said, “Yes. We get to investigate!”

The boy with blue hair said, “It’s the purpose of our club, after all.”

And although Beomgyu wasn’t in the mood to be followed around by weirdos, he didn’t care too much about what they did so long as he got to Chess Club. “Suit yourself,” he told them. He watched as they started migrating towards the door. Towards him. He didn’t recognize them. Not off the top of his head, anyway. The cool one not wearing his uniform properly and stuffing his face with cookies looked vaguely familiar, however. Beomgyu decided not to put too much more thought into it. He would hopefully be rid of these guys within the ten seconds it took to walk down the hallway to the next room.

“Introductions are in order,” said one boy.

“They really aren’t,” Beomgyu cut in. “I don’t need to know your names.”

That didn’t stop them.

“I’m Yeonjun.”

“I’m Taehyun.”

“That’s Hueningkai. Behind you.”

“Hey. I can introduce myself. That’s Soobin.”

The flurry of finger pointing and hand waving was over too quickly for Beomgyu to really associate names with faces but, if he was being honest, he wasn’t paying all that much attention in the first place. He just wanted to get out of there. He just wanted to be rid of them.

“What’s your name,” asked the blue-haired one, leaning forward and getting far closer to Beomgyu’s face than he needed to.

“Beomgyu,” he responded. Then he turned back around to leave the room.

They all stepped out into the hallway after him but Beomgyu ignored their friendly chattering and turned left down the tile-floored hallway. 

This all brought him back to his original problem, the one little thing that started this whole mess: How had he walked into the wrong room? He’d never done something so silly all semester!

Well… 

He  _ had _ been a tad distracted while walking up the stairs earlier. Perhaps he really had done something lame like walk past the correct door. “Pull yourself together, Beomgyu,” he chided himself as he slid open the next classroom door. “They can’t catch you out here lacking.” He started to address his fellow Chess Club members. “Sorry I’m la-” 

The sentence stopped dead on his tongue as he stepped further into the room.

Yup. He’d come across another indisputable truth about the world as he knew it.

This also wasn’t the right room. 

Which was  _ weird _ because it was supposed to be the Chess Club room. 

Or so he thought! 

Wouldn’t that make sense? If he’d overshot it by one, shouldn’t this be the correct room? Instead, he was where the Poetry Club met after school. 

Pssh. The Poetry Club. 

Probably the easiest, most brain-dead, resume-padding club on campus that still managed to at least sound interesting and impactful on paper but that was it. There was no real substance behind it. And that was Beomgyu being nice about it. 

Some of the students stared wistfully into their copies of pretentious poetry books. Others had sheets of white paper on their desks and filled line after line with their own elegantly scribbled rhymes. The majority of them, though, were slacking off. Talking and laughing or fawning over keychain baubles hanging from their backpacks or messing around on their phones. Only one or two of them even looked up in Beomgyu’s direction as he hovered near the door with the expression of a confused puppy on his face. Head tilt included.

“I’ve got the wrong room,” he mumbled and then, as gracefully as he could, backed out of the room.

Huh. Weeeeeird.

He shut the classroom door and took one step backwards too many. He wound up with his back to someone’s chest. He glanced up to see that he had run into Blue Hair, who just smiled down at Beomgyu cheerfully.

“Find what you were looking for,” asked one of the weirdos. The tall one with the lengthy name.

“He didn’t if he’s frowning like that,” said another. The one not wearing his uniform properly.

Beomgyu ignored them. Clearly, he was being pranked. Not just by these guys but by the Chess Club as well. It was the only explanation he could think of. “Out of the way,” he grunted, pushing past the smallest, shortest boy. The one with the book. Beomgyu practically ran down the hallway until he was standing near the top of the east stairs. Talk about starting over from the beginning! He took a deep breath, held it, let it out. As if he needed to center himself or something equally esoteric. Then, like an elementary student who had yet to memorize where their homeroom was, Beomgyu turned back around and, out loud, counted the doors as he passed them until he got to the third one on the right.

He didn’t have to open the door because it was still open. It was the club room for the Magical Boys or whatever they called themselves.

Huh. Weiiiiird.

He hadn’t miscounted at all. This club room was where it wasn’t supposed to be. Or, more accurately, the Chess Club room was not where it was supposed to be. 

Now he was getting properly worried. Frazzled. Concerned.

Beomgyu ran a hand through his hair. Was he losing it? “It’s supposed to be here. How can it not be here?” He was definitely being pranked. Or, worse, the Chess Club had been moved to a different room and no one in the club had thought to tell him. Or, even worse, the Chess Club had been disbanded and no one in the club had thought to tell him! This was stressing him out. “Why isn’t the Chess Club here?”

“The room is supposed to be here and yet it’s not,” said Blue Hair, tapping a long, slender finger to his chin. “Oh, this is definitely Uncanny.”

“Can’t you smell it in the air,” asked Improperly-Worn Uniform. “I think I feel a bit of a charge.”

“The game’s afoot,” said The Short One. “Time to unravel.”

They were doing that thing where they weren’t making sense again. Beomgyu stiffened.

“What’s the room number you’re looking for,” asked the Lengthy-Named one.

“3-C,” Beomgyu recited. 

“I don’t see it,” the same guy stated, looking around.

“Neither do I,” Beomgyu said sarcastically. But the phrase ‘I don’t see it’ perfectly encapsulated the situation. It’s not as if any of them were incapable of seeing the right room, it’s that the right room was unable to be seen. The Magic Nerds club room was 3-D, Beomgyu guessed, based on the sign next to the door. Beomgyu retraced his steps back down the hall to the Poetry Club’s room and was slightly startled that the sign next to that door read 3-B. No. That was technically correct. The Poetry Club was always in 3-B. But that posed a larger question. How on earth was 3-C skipped? It wasn’t like the rooms alternated letters or anything. They were supposed to be in order! He walked even farther down the hall to the next room, 3-A. He forgot what club met there but it wasn’t the Chess Club so did it really matter? The place he was looking for was simply not there. “The room’s just  _ gone _ ,” he announced, turning around to look at the others.

“Ahh, so it’s  _ missing _ -missing,” said Improper Uniform. “We haven’t had something go missing in a while.”

“Not since the cafeteria that one time.”

“But that happened at night when no one else was here so did that really count?”

“Yeah. It does. It’s like a tree falling with no one around to hear it.”

Lengthy Name asked, “Nothing else has budged, has it?”

“Nah, 3-E is here like it’s supposed to be,” said Shorty.

“Which means 3-C is supposed to be… Hmmm. Split it evenly… Right around here,” Blue Hair stated, putting his hand on a flat, bare section of the painted-white brick wall.

“Like an entire classroom could just disappear,” huffed Beomgyu, still skeptical. “Like the cafeteria could just up and leave.” Like, what were they even  _ talking _ about?

“It can move if it wants to move,” said Lengthy Name. “That’s how magic works.”

“You guys are weirdos,” said Beomgyu in all honesty.

“Nah. We’re Uncanny. There’s a difference.”

There was that word again. Uncanny. Beomgyu knew what it meant definition-wise but it must mean something special to these guys if they kept using it repeatedly. 

He knew he would instantly regret hearing the answer but Beomgyu asked, “Are you all really telling me the room magically disappeared?”

“Yeah,” two of the boys said in unison. One even rolled his eyes as if that should have been obvious.

“These things do happen,” said the third.

“It’s why we made the club,” said the fourth.

“It’s highly underappreciated work but the magic’s fun so it’s okay,” said the second one.

Beomgyu decidedly ignored all of the nonsensical magic stuff they were spouting and continued to cling to the idea that this was all some well-orchestrated prank. But, even as he stood there, such a thought seemed a little dumb. It wasn’t like the signs outside of the classroom doors could be easily rearranged. That would require hard to obtain power tools and step ladders. Not exactly the easiest kind of prank to pull off in a school of this size. Besides, you couldn’t fake the arrangement of an entire room. Even if they hung the 3-D sign outside of the 3-C room, the interior wouldn’t change. The location of the door and the blackboard wouldn’t change. And, on top of that, such a prank would require the cooperation of multiple clubs and Beomgyu doubted that so many people would work together to do something like this. Something so unequivocally pointless. Something so stupid. No way would they all do  _ this _ just to prank him. But Beomgyu had new priorities. “I’m sorry, what were your names again?” He couldn’t keep track at all and it was beginning to bug him.

“Didn’t we already go through this?”

“Weren’t you listening?”

Beomgyu snapped, “Just tell me again. Slowly.”

The short one went first, “Kang Taehyun.” He was cute, in a way, with wide and round eyes and round, wire-framed glasses. He had dark hair styled up and away from his forehead in an almost pompous manner. The boy wore his uniform impeccably: black tie knotted perfectly, his orange blazer with white trim buttoned up snazzily, his black and white checkerboard pants so sharply pressed that Beomgyu could see the stylish creases and smell the starch. Taehyun continued, “Student Leader of class 1-C.” 

Ahh a first year. No wonder Beomgyu didn’t know him. It was a bit of a shame the kid had fallen into such a wacko crowd. Something like this would haunt his social life for the next three years. A permanent stain on his reputation. Beomgyu said, “I really don’t need to know your classes.”

“Call me Kai,” stated the tall one with the usually long name. His hair was voluminous and curly but not necessarily untamed. His round face was dotted with freckles and acne scars. He must have hit a recent growth spurt because the sleeves of his unbuttoned blazer and the bottom hem of his checkered pants were noticeably short, exposing his wrists and bare, knobby ankles. Even his tie was loosely done up so that his slightly-too-small dress shirt could go without the top button being done. “Class 1-A. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

He held out his hand for a shake.

Beomgyu ignored the guy’s outstretched arm. “Stop telling me your classes.”

The one not wearing his uniform properly went next. “Yo. I’m Choi Yeonjun,” he said. He wiped cookie crumbs from around his mouth. “I got held back a year.” He said such a thing as if it were something to be proud of. Or, rather, as if it were a thing you just casually brought up when introducing yourself. Although he donned the orange, white and black windbreaker usually only worn by the school’s sports teams, it was unzipped and hung off his shoulders like an attempt at a fashion statement. Beneath it was a Mickey Mouse t-shirt that was clearly a crop top from the girl’s section of the store based on how tightly the fabric clung to his sleek torso, how the cotton rode up and exposed his belly button every time he moved. “Class 3-B. Nice to meet ya.”

Ahh, a third year, Beomgyu thought. Mere weeks away from graduation and being forced to face the real world yet still loudly believing in magic. How absurd.

The blue-haired one paused his ‘investigation’ of the brick wall and glanced over his shoulder. “Choi Soobin, at your service,” he introduced himself. His smile was wide and charming and his dimples were deep. His eyes kind of sparkled a bit in the mid-afternoon sunlight pouring in through the windows in the hall. He was shockingly attractive. Clearly the kind of guy who got a dozen love confessions a week. The kind of guy who was known for his looks. For his handsomeness. But wasn’t he wasting it being in a club like this? He said, “I’m in Class 3-C.”

Beomgyu realized he hadn’t taken a breath since he made eye contact with the guy. He choked on air and looked away, feeling like his face was burning up. For some strange reason. “Choi Beomgyu,” he announced, feeling oddly brittle. Fragile. And even though he was the one who had said naming their classes wasn’t necessary, he added, “Class 2-F.” When he looked back in Soobin’s direction, he nearly choked all over again because Soobin was still looking at him. Still smiling at him.

Soobin glanced at the others. “With that out of the way, let’s get back to the situation at hand. If you guys don’t mind, can we make this a top priority?”

Beomgyu put two and two together. If a little late. “Wait. It’s  _ your _ homeroom that’s missing?”

“It’s not missing,” said Soobin. “Missing implies that it’s been taken and put somewhere else. Like the cafeteria that one time. That’s not the case here. The room has just been… folded? Yeah, that works. It’s just been squeezed very tight.” He looked over at Yeonjun. “We should rename this The Case Of The Classroom Seemingly Folded Into A Pocket Dimension. That’s more accurate.” Soobin turned back to the blank wall and gave it a pat with his hand. “The door is right here, staring us all in the face.”

After hearing such a preposterous statement, Beomgyu decided right then and there that he’d just skip his club meeting and go home early today. He could use a nap. He had plenty of science homework to get through. And a big art project to start on that was due at the end of the week. Maybe he could get a headstart on studying for the end-of-term exams? Could never be too careful.

Soobin called out, “Someone give me a hand.”

“I’ll go,” Taehyun piped up. He eagerly rushed forward and joined Soobin at the wall.

“Put your hand here,” Soobin instructed. “Feel it? No. A bit more to the left. Right there. Okay. Now pull.”

Both of them grunted with effort. Taehyun’s shoes squeaked on the tile floor as he briefly slid. 

Whatever they were trying to do, they didn’t manage to do it.

Soobin shouted, “Kai!”

“On it.” Kai joined them at the wall. More grunting. More shoe squeaking.

Darn it. Now Beomgyu was curious! Instead of walking away and leaving the weirdos behind, like any other level-headed person would do in such a moment, he stepped closer to them and got up on his tiptoes to peer over their shoulders and see what they were doing.

But… 

For several seconds, he couldn’t exactly tell what they were up to. 

Yet the longer he watched, the more sense their actions seemed to make.

The three of them were… doing  _ something _ . Their fingers flattened and clenched, scrambling for purchase on thin air. But it also kind of looked like they were trying to open something without making use of its handle. As if they were all extremely skilled but offensively noisy mimes.

Yeonjun joined in on the fun. He stood behind Taehyun, grabbed hold of… of  _ nothing _ , and then began pulling. He threw his weight sideways and halfway screamed as he yanked hard on… nothing. It was like all four of them were trying to pull open a set of exceptionally heavy sliding doors.

Except there weren’t any doors. Just a white, blank brick wall.

Beomgyu made his decision. 

He’d seen more than enough. He’d just head home. Maybe he’d text one of his clubmates and ask about what happened to Chess Club. “I’m going to go.” But just as he turned away, he saw something out of the corner of his eye.

Something inexplicable.

Something remarkable.

Something weird.

Something… What was the word they always used? Something… Uncanny. 

As if they actually  _ were _ opening a door, the four boys moved apart. Soobin and Kai in one direction. Yeonjun and Taehyun in the other. Just one or two steps, but they still moved. And in the space left between them was now a hole.

“Pull harder,” Soobin ordered. He kept his voice oddly firm despite how much physical effort he was exerting.

“Put your backs into it,” Yeonjun shouted. 

The four boys gave a coordinated heave-ho and managed to step even farther apart, managed to pull the hole slightly wider.

No. Hole didn’t properly describe it even though Beomgyu could look into it, even though he could see down into it and spot the dark at the bottom. It wasn’t a hole that he was looking at. Soobin had been right. It was a  _ fold _ . The classroom between 3-B and 3-D slowly came into view like they were all opening a very large book.

“Do you want me to help,” Beomgyu asked. And he surprised himself with how eager he was. How badly he wanted to participate. Something as weird as this should have sent him running for the hills but he found himself rooted to the spot. Curious. Intrigued.

“No,” Soobin huffed. “We’ll pull it apart. You have to reach in and grab hold of the door to 3-C.”

Beomgyu didn’t know half of what was going on but he still thought that sounded dangerous. “Alright,” he agreed.

“Come on, guys. Pull,” Kai hissed from between gritted teeth.

“We’re trying. We’re trying,” Taehyun squeaked. He usually looked entirely unruffled but now he was quite ruffled. Sweaty forehead. Stirred-up hair.

The four of them pulled harder. The two pairs of them stepped farther apart, step by step by step. Nearly the width of a classroom. And even as Beomgyu stood there and watched, the hallway stretched and stretched. Reality pulled taut like chewed gum. Like fresh taffy. Beomgyu felt the world shift beneath him a little and, at least twice, had to readjust his footing as floor tiles warped into existence and pushed his feet apart. In front of him, the brick walls grew into place, windows appeared and, at long last, the door showed up. Like an old friend come to visit. Next to the door, the sign read 3-C. 

Third door on the right. Exactly where it was supposed to be.

Finally.

“Impossible,” Beomgyu stated, even though he had watched the whole thing.

Yeonjun had the audacity to turn and wink at him. “No, not impossible. Just Uncanny.” 

“Quick,” Soobin commanded. “Beomgyu, open the classroom door or the hallway will snap closed again.”

And none of that made any sense at all but it also made all of the sense in the world. Treat the hallway like a hallway and it would start acting like a hallway again.

Huh. Not so weird.

Beomgyu stepped forward, gripped the handle and slid the door wide.

It opened easily. Without issue. It only squeaked on its tracks a little bit.

Beomgyu  _ felt  _ the world snap back into place. Just the tiniest little rattle. The faintest pop. 

Puzzle pieces snapping into place.

On his left, Soobin and Kai shrieked and tumbled backwards onto the floor like they’d just been shoved.

On his right, Taehyun dropped to his knees and Yeonjun, being far more athletic than the others, only lost his balance and wobbled for a moment before straightening to his full height again.

Beomgyu stood in the doorway, breathless even though he hadn’t done much pulling. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a very real chance that things could have gone wrong. It was in the way goosebumps travelled up his arms, sensing danger. It was in the way electric tingles of fear shot across the back of his neck, triggering his fight or flight. It occurred to him, rather late, that his clubmates may have been in some kind of mild danger folded up in their little dimension thingy.

But… 

“Hey, don’t pout. It all worked out,” Kai said, pushing himself to his feet.

“It could have gotten messy,” Taehyun mumbled. “Like the cafeteria. The cafeteria was a mess.”

“But this was pretty clean,” Yeonjuni told him.

“Alright, guys, back to the club room,” said Soobin, wiping dust off the backside of his pants. He led the way back to 3-D.

Taehyun followed after him, almost at his heels. “Yes. I need to make a note of this in the book. Where’s my pen?”

Beomgyu was flabbergasted. “Wait. That’s it? That’s all you have to do?”

Yeonjun shrugged. “These things usually aren’t difficult to undo.”

Kai scrunched up his nose. “Except the cafeteria. That was crazy hard.”

Why did they keep bringing up the cafeteria? “No… I mean, like…” Beomgyu wasn’t sure how he should word this question. He waved an arm towards the open door. “That’s it? Everything Is finished? Just like that?”

“Yeah. We solve problems. That’s our one club activity.” Kai stiffly followed Soobin to room 3-D, holding a hand to his waist like it was slightly sore.

“Is that all it took,” Beomgyu asked. “For real?” He thought the process would have been longer and more involved than that. Instead, the whole thing hadn’t even taken five minutes.

“Everything seems pretty stable,” Yeonjun commented, peering into the room and looking things over. “Nothing seems permanently damaged. The structure’s not too far off.” He held up his hands. “We shouldn’t have any snap backs.”

Still shocked, Beomgyu stood there and wondered if anything in the past few minutes had actually happened. Maybe he’d dreamed it up. Maybe he wasn’t drinking enough water. Maybe his blood sugar was low. Maybe he wasn’t incorporating enough iron into his diet. Maybe--

Yeonjun slapped a hand on Beomgyu’s shoulder, startling him. “Thanks for the help, bud.”

“I should be thanking you guys,” said Beomgyu. “I guess. Yeah. I mean, I suppose.”

Yeonjun gave him a look. “That almost sounded sincere, dude.”

But before Beomgyu could say anything else, Yeonjun just gave him a salute and then turned around and walked away.

“Hey, Beomgyu,” called out one of Beomgyu’s club members. “What took you so long?”

The loud voice snapped Beomgyu out of his thoughts. He looked around the classroom. Everything was like it was supposed to be. Everything was where it should be. 

Everything was normal.

Yeah. Normal. 

Everything was… canny.

Was he using that word right?

“Sorry, I’m late,” he said, stepping across the threshold and shutting the door behind him. “I had some trouble finding something.”

“Hmmm?” Another of his clubmates turned their head towards him even though they were in the middle of a match. “You’re usually good at finding things.”

“I know. That’s what’s weird,” Beomgyu huffed. And to think it would be this whole entire classroom that he couldn’t find.

It was odd, though. Even though he was standing right here in the one place he’d been trying to get to all of this time, he still felt out of place.

“Hey hey hey. Beomgyu!” 

Beomgyu snapped out of his thoughts. He turned to look towards the far end of the room. “Hmm. What?”

“Come over here. Quickly.” The guy who had called out to him was little Nishimura Riki. Class 1-A. A child genius, of sorts, who had skipped the majority of his middle school years to wind up here, in high school, despite of (or in spite of) his surprisingly young age. Even with his pretty reckless plays, he was one of the Chess Club’s best and brightest. Borderline undefeated. Even Sunghoon hadn’t beat him yet. The boy grinned from ear to ear, “Let’s play a game.”

That didn’t sound like fun.

“You’re gonna win,” Beomgyu shot back. 

“Think of it as practice.”

“You’re gonna absolutely trounce me.” Beomgyu still walked over to the other end of the classroom anyways. He still sat down on the chair opposite Riki and wiped his palms off on the thighs of his checkered pants.

Riki brushed his short dark hair away from his eyes and tried to sound all philosophical. “It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about playing.” There was a snappy rhythm to the way he said things. Like a song.

“It’s all about winning, don’t you know,” Beomgyu directly contradicted. “History only remembers the winners.” If he was going to rank himself in Chess Club, he’d be modest and put himself at #9 or #10 or #11. Sunoo was #2 and Riki, obviously, was the cream of the crop. If Beomgyu could get into the top five before the semester ended, maybe he could make a career of this or something. Go pro. Maybe he could be on TV like his dad used to be.

“Hmmm,” Riki hummed. He squinted across the table at Beomgyu and then, with both hands, spun the chess board around so that he was sitting in front of the rows of white pieces. “Winning… Losing… Who cares. I still think it’s all about playing. You won’t get far if all you think about is the end results. If all you think about is winning.”

Leave it to the number one player to preach that being number one didn’t mean anything. “All I think about is losing,” Beomgyu once again contradicted, “and how badly I don’t want to do it. Are we playing or not?”

Riki moved first. A pretty basic, standard advance from one of his pawns.

Beomgyu countered with a move of his own. 

Riki slid forward another pawn, keeping his eyes on Beomgyu’s face as if searching for any tells, any cracks in the facade.

Beomgyu retaliated with an equally simple move of his own.

Back and forth they went. First white, then black. White and then black. It sounded like a fast-moving, epic clash of steel against steel but chess was a game of silence and patience. Even the seemingly boring opening moves of pawn versus pawn could set up a player’s victory.

Riki took the first pawn. He twirled Beomgyu’s piece around his fingers like it was a toy or something and sighed with relief.

As expected, Beomgyu thought. He heaved a sigh of his own, tinged with the acceptance of his terrible fate. His next move was a bit more offensive and put at least two of Riki’s pieces at risk. Beomgyu calculated his plan. If Riki made any of two moves, Beomgyu could get him back.

Riki hesitated, hand in the air above the piece he’d been about to move, before he swiftly changed his mind, grabbed an entirely different piece and made the one move that Beomgyu wasn’t expecting.

Now Beomgyu’s own pieces were at risk and Riki could easily take any of the three.

As expected.

“Don’t give up yet,” Riki told him. He must have sensed Beomgyu’s shift in mood.

“I haven’t,” said Beomgyu. Although he was right on the verge of doing so.

Beomgyu usually put every thought in his brain towards playing chess. It took a lot of energy. He had to know which move to make. But he also had to plan around which move his opponent was likely to make. Which move he should make to counter the move his opponent made. Plans within plans.

But today, he wasn’t thinking about chess. Not really. He didn’t want to think about chess.

He didn’t want to think about losing.

Beomgyu  _ wanted _ to think about how pretty of an afternoon it was turning out to be when it had been so gloomy and rainy yesterday and that morning. He wanted to think about the slashes of sunlight pouring in through the club room’s open windows. The warm, gentle breeze stirring up Riki’s hair.

He wanted to think about Uncanny things and the four weirdo boys that solved funky magical problems next door.

He wanted to think about how the Chess Club room had disappeared. Or, how Yeonjun had put it, how the room had gone  _ missing _ -missing.

After Beomgyu aimlessly, thoughtlessly, moved his knight towards the center of the board, he glanced around the club room. 

Everyone was calm, quiet. Either reading books about chess or leaning over a chess board, knee-deep in a game with a fellow club member. The club advisor, Beomgyu’s Hanja teacher, wandered up and down the aisles, narrowing her eyes at the chess boards as she passed as if calculating her own set of moves. 

There wasn’t a hint of panic in anyone’s gestures.

No one seemed to know that they’d been folded into a pocket dimension. 

Riki cleared his throat. “Earth to Beomgyu.”

Beomgyu turned back to the game, startled. “Oh,” he choked out. He usually didn’t zone out so hard in the middle of a match. “Sorry, man.” 

Riki motioned towards the board. “Your move.”

Even though Beomgyu returned his attention to the game, that didn’t mean he was focusing on it. He stared at the black and white patterns on the chess board and took note of how similar the pattern was to their school uniforms. Beomgyu shifted one of his pieces forward and knocked one of Riki’s over as he claimed it. Huh. Did he stop for ice cream on the way home? Or should he spend part of his allowance on a novel?

“Go for the ice cream,” Riki said. “It’s getting hot out now. Gotta stay cool.”

Beomgyu nodded in enthusiastic agreement. “You’re right,” he said, and then let his thoughts wander. Strawberry was unmatched. He hoped the convenience store across the street had some in stock. Why did the washing machine have different settings for white clothing and dark colors? Did it do something different during the cycle?

Huh. That’s a thought. He should look that up.

When it was his turn, he slid one of his pieces boldly forward. Instead of moving something of his forward defensively, Riki took a direct approach of his own, moving a piece towards the outside of the board.

Beomgyu frowned. And not just because he was losing ground.

Did no one here know that they’d been zipped into a different plane of existence or whatever it was that it was called? Did no one know they’d gone missing-missing and were probably in some kind of existential danger?

“Beomgyu?” Riki’s slightly raspy voice brought Beomgyu back to the present. “I can’t seem to get a clear read on your moves today.”

And that was because Beomgyu had abandoned all strategy like three turns ago. “Sorry,” he grumbled, sliding a piece forward. “Got a lot on my mind.”

“I can see that.”

They exchanged turns. Riki made a weak play which Beomgyu countered with ease, capturing one of his pieces. If he was paying slightly more attention, he’d have noticed that he was turning the tide. That he was winning.

But no… He was still thinking about disappearing classrooms.

Would the Chess Club still be  _ somewhere else _ if Beomgyu hadn’t noticed the missing door? 

If he hadn’t stopped at the bathroom first, would he have gotten folded away along with them?

Would it have been scary? Would it have hurt?

If one of the club members had flung open the door from the inside, would they have stepped out into some star-dotted rainbow sky? What did the inside of a pocket dimension look like anyway? Was it fluffy like cotton candy?

“Cotton candy,” repeated Riki, confused.

Beomgyu bit his bottom lip. He must have mumbled his thoughts aloud. He looked up across the table. The two of them locked eyes for a moment but neither of them moved. Beomgyu raised an arm to move his bishop but Riki made a sharp noise. Beomgyu pulled back his hand. It must still be the prodigy’s turn.

Riki held his gaze for a moment then looked down to shift his own bishop.

Which was… shocking? Because he’d just set himself up. Left himself unprotected. Riki gasped, as if just now realizing his mistake, but it was far too late. Beomgyu moved one of his own pieces forward, slid Riki’s out of the way and hoisted the captured piece up into his palm with a showy flourish. 

Riki let out a nervous laugh. “My bad.” It wasn’t like Riki to slip up so bad. “I know, right? I’m screwing up real bad.”

But Beomgyu’s mind still wasn’t on the game, as triumphant of a moment as that was. He was thinking about--

“Do you know Soobin,” Riki asked out of the blue, eyebrows raised.

Beomgyu looked up at him, startled. He must have let something in his head fall out of his mouth again.

“Oops,” said Riki. “You being frazzled is making me frazzled. I slipped up.”

“Wait,” Beomgyu caught on. No matter what way he thought of it, he was positive that he hadn’t said much of anything for most of the game but Riki had been responding to him as if they’d been in a conversation. “Can you--”

Riki shushed him, a finger held up to his own lips.

_ Read my mind _ , Beomgyu finished in his head.

“Yeah,” Riki sighed. He sounded a little dejected. Like he hadn’t meant Beomgyu to find out this way. He slid one of his pieces forward, leaving himself exposed.

“Can you really?” Beomgyu captured that piece as well, leaving a gaping hole in Riki’s defenses.

Riki replied, “Think of something.”

Beomgyu couldn’t help but think ‘ _ something _ .’

“A bit more literal than I was expecting,” Riki said, keeping his voice low so that they wouldn’t be overheard. “Think of something else.”

Beomgyu immediately thought ‘ _ something else _ .’

Riki snorted back a laugh. “Cute.”

“I’m trying,” Beomgyu huffed. “Can you do that all of the time?” Should he be afraid?

“Don’t freak out,” said Riki. “For some odd reason, I can only do it when I’m playing chess with someone.”

Beomgyu tilted his head back as the puzzle pieces slotted themselves together in his head. “So  _ that’s _ how you always win.”

Riki shushed him again. “Don’t tell anyone.”

Beomgyu still wasn’t sure he believed in such nonsense anyway. Maybe Riki was just good at guessing. Or maybe Beomgyu was still in some kind of mental shock after what had happened in the hall and he didn’t realize he was spewing all of his thoughts aloud. Yeah. That had to be it. “I don’t care enough to tell anyone else,” he said. But then, immediately, he thought that he should tell the Uncanny so-and-so’s and hear what they had to say about it. 

“They already know,” Riki answered.

Welp.

Beomgyu propped his chin on his hand. “There’s not much else I can do then, huh?” But now he was a little bit sad because he no longer had an excuse to try and see them again.

Not that he wanted to hang out with those clowns or anything!

He just wanted to  _ see _ .

He thought about that moment half an hour ago and how it felt like his feet had left the floor when Soobin had turned away from the window to look at him. He thought about how hot his face had gotten. How dizzy and lightheaded the eye contact made him. Like he was floating halfway to the ceiling when Soobin smiled at him, dimples showing.

Riki curled his mouth into a pleased little grin. He said, “All of your thoughts just turned periwinkle blue.” Then he reached out a hand and laid down his queen in defeat.

  
  
  
  


**Wednesday, 7:56 AM.**

Sometimes you just have to accept the fact that you’re going to be late.

The world just worked like that sometimes. Things just shaped up in a way that even if you scrambled around and rushed and wasted your energy, you’d remain behind schedule.

“May as well play it cool,” Beomgyu muttered aloud.

While his schoolmates ran and laughed and screamed up the path on either side of him, already tired and sweaty, Beomgyu walked at a normal pace. To conserve energy was his excuse. He was through the school gates and  _ on campus _ , which was all that mattered, so who cared if he walked into class late? That was a thing that was going to happen whether he made a mad dash for the stairs or not. And he’d rather walk in all cool and unbothered then crash into the room sweaty and breathless. Besides, who thought it was a good idea to teach Advanced Physics first thing in the morning anyway? Math shouldn’t be taught before lunch. It shouldn’t be taught after lunch either. Who needed math? Really, Beomgyu was late as a form of peaceful protest! It was the curriculum’s fault for getting everything wrong from the get go. He was just proving it to them by showing how ineffective it was to be subjected to math as soon as he walked into the building each morning.

Oh? It seemed like the gardeners’ hard work on the flowers and shrubs along the path was finally paying off. Many of them were already starting to bloom, petals tilting to face the rising sun.

Beomgyu was almost at the school’s front doors when he spotted a group of his schoolmates huddled in the grass off to the side of the asphalt path. He couldn’t figure out who they were, but they were in no hurry to get to class on time. Just like him. In a way, that made them comrades.

They were kneeling. Hovering over… something. Talking in low but not necessarily hushed voices.

The 8:00 bell rang and the trill little melody that played over the loudspeakers made the stragglers of students stampede like a herd of bulls.

But those guys in the grass? They didn’t move. They were in even less than a hurry than he was and Beomgyu had to commend them for that.

“It wouldn’t be a good idea to set it on fire,” Beomgyu heard one of them say.

“But how else can we test it and determine it’s a phoenix egg?” Beomgyu heard another of them ask.

Beomgyu was just about to walk right past them without giving them a second thought when he spotted a familiar head of bright blue hair.

Soobin.

That was the only person it could be.

His heart didn’t sprint in his chest, but it  _ did _ start jogging a little

Gosh! Really. How could Soobin dye his hair like that without getting in trouble? The teachers went on power-trips if the girls even did so much as put colorful clip-on extensions in their hair. Soobin stuck out like a sore thumb. A neon sign.

“What are those weirdos doing over there,” Beomgyu whispered. Kai seemed to be holding some extremely large and oblong stone in his hands that glittered like a jewel.

All of them. They were up to something weird again. Something… What was that word they always used? Idiosyncratic? No. That didn’t feel right. Too many syllables. Still, Beomgyu was interested enough that he turned to walk towards--

No. No! He was not curious at all. Nope. Nuh uh! He shifted his weight and kept his shoes on the concrete path leading to the main stairs. Nope. He didn’t want to get involved in the slightest! He didn’t care what it was they were leaning over and examining and tapping with their fingers. 

A phoenix egg? Who cares? It wasn’t any of his business. 

“I’m gonna go,” he told no one, and then started up the flight of stairs to the front doors.

And he had looked away from them just in time because the smallest one, Taehyun, shouted out not a second later, “Beomgyu!”

The sheer volume of his name almost made Beomgyu flinch but he kept walking as if he hadn’t heard. Class was about to start, he reasoned, and he could pretend that he didn’t hear anything over the noisy crowd of students that surged around him like the raging current of river rapids.

If he could just make it to the double doors--

“Yo!” That had to be Yeonjun. “Over here!”

Beomgyu resisted the urge to take off running. If he ran, if he flinched, if he turned his head, if he acknowledged them in any way, even if it was to get mad, they’d drag him over and make him be a part of their weird, zany games.

He’d rather sit through Advanced Physics.

“Beomgyu,” Kai yelled. “Maybe he can’t hear us?”

Soobin was the next to shout something, but by then, Beomgyu had reached the school’s doors. He’d reached safety. 

Normalcy.

  
  
  
  


**12:04 PM.**

Beomgyu had just got out of World History and was on his way downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch when he spotted Kai in the hallway. The tall, bushy-haired kid was standing near the top of the exact staircase that Beomgyu needed to descend.

It didn’t particularly seem like Kai was waiting for him specifically, but if the kid turned his head any further to the left, which he was definitely about to do, then they’d make horrible, wretched, unprecedented eye contact.

Beomgyu was faced with a moral dilemma. 

Did he acknowledge Kai? Did he wave or say hey or smile or something? Because, like, they weren’t really friends at all. Not really. At least he hoped not. That would be awful! And Beomgyu still thought that the whole group of guys in that oddball after school club were a bunch of weirdos. But his good conscience wouldn’t let him forget that those boys  _ had _ helped him out.

At least a little.

Even if he still wasn’t exactly sure how they’d done so.

But they were still strange, wacko dudes!

Yet without them, he would have missed Chess Club. That whole classroom full of people would still be folded up into La La Land or whatever.

But… But!

Kai’s uniform was too small for him. Or, really, it probably perfectly fit him last semester. But it was an imperfect fit now. Beomgyu could  _ see _ how Kai’s blazer strained to stretch over his elbows, how his pants struggled to contain his thighs. Wasn’t he uncomfortable? 

Beomgyu realized that he’d taken about four or five steps closer to the staircase, and, by proxy, four or five steps closer to Kai. Kai, who had most definitely just spotted him in the moving crowd and who was now looking right at him. Waving directly at him.

Beomgyu turned his gaze to the floor, pretending to be (but not really pretending because he actually was) deep in thought. He could just walk past the guy. Ignore him. Act like he didn’t hear if the underclassman called out to him. Did he have his AirPods? He could slip them in and act like he wasn’t paying any attention. His options were limited as he was beyond the point of no return. Stopping and turning around now would look like he was actively avoiding the guy and although that was exactly what Beomgyu wanted to do, he didn’t want to do it in a way that made it obvious that he was doing it.

Why did Beomgyu have to be so nice!

Unfortunately, he didn’t get a chance to come up with an escape plan because Kai made the final decision on how to handle their encounter on his own. 

He walked right up to Beomgyu and said, “Let’s go to the cafeteria together.” And then he motioned for Beomgyu to follow him down the stairs.

“I hope you don’t plan on sitting with me,” Beomgyu blurted out.

“No, actually,” said Kai smoothly. “I was thinking you could sit with us.”

And that was even worse. Beomgyu gripped the handrail and started after him. He asked, “Is there a reason why?”

Kai looked over his shoulder and stared up at Beomgyu who trailed several steps behind. “The guys and I were talking about what happened yesterday and, naturally, we all agreed that you have a knack for handling Uncanny situations.”

“A knack for handling… I didn’t do anything.”

“The fact that you noticed the classroom was gone was something.”

“Anyone would notice if a whole entire classroom was gone.”

“Hmm. Not necessarily,” said Kai. “Especially when--”

Beomgyu knew what he was about to say. He interrupted, “--something Uncanny is involved?”

Kai smiled. “Exactly. See? You’re a natural.”

Beomgyu frowned. “I hope you aren’t about to ask me to join your club. Again.” He raised his foot to step down off the last stair.

Based on the grin on Kai’s face, that was exactly what he was about to ask, but before the request left his mouth, Kai was just  _ gone _ .

It wasn’t like he’d taken off running or something. Kai was there one second and had disappeared the next.

No. Wait. Hold on. Hold on! 

Beomgyu looked around. If he’d come down that staircase, he should be in the central corridor of the main school building. The one that went past the faculty lounge and the principal’s suite and the student store and, most importantly, the cafeteria. So how in the world did Beomgyu end up in the hallway in front of the gymnasium? “I’m in an entirely different building,” he commented. He was flabbergasted. Like… Every single one of his gasts were flabbered! He turned around. There was a staircase behind him but not only was Kai not on those stairs, Beomgyu shouldn’t have been coming down this particular flight of stairs in the first place. “How did I get here?”

And maybe, just maybe, he was the tiniest bit scared.

Beomgyu exhaled through his nose and stepped down the hall. If he wanted to get to the cafeteria from here, he had to walk all the way through the newly-built school building which would add five minutes to his walk and subtract five minutes from his meal-eating time. And it was hotteok day, too!

“Yo,” came a cheerful and awfully familiar and terribly overfamiliar greeting.

Beomgyu turned to his left.

Standing near the open double doors of the gym was Choi Yeonjun. Even when he was dressed for PE, he still managed to do it improperly. Now (of all times) he chose to wear his school blazer, dress shirt and tie when it wasn’t exactly appropriate. Instead of the recommended work out pants, black with a white stripe up the leg, Yeonjun wore a pair of wildly short nylon shorts that weren’t even in their school colors.

“Hey,” Beomgyu called out to him. There was no ignoring him now.

“What are you doing here,” Yeonjun asked. 

“I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know.”

“Hmm. Seems like a bad spot to be in.”

“You’ve got that right, my dude.”

“Don’t you want to eat lunch?”

“I can ask you the same thing.”

“I’m on the way.” Yeonjun paused. Took a moment to think. “But what about you? Are you on the way?”

“Yeah. But I just… Well, I was walking along… And then wound up here. Somehow.”

“Cool.”

“Not cool, actually.”

Yeonjun shrugged. He started bouncing a ball off his shoe and then off of his knee and then off his other foot. Like he was a soccer player. Except it was a basketball he was expertly handling in such a way.

“I’m gonna go,” said Beomgyu, already turning away.

“I’ll come with,” Yeonjun decided.

“Why?”

“Just because.”

“You really don’t have to.”

But it was a tad too late because Yeonjun was already following him, bouncing the basketball off of his knee and then off of the top of his head and then off of his foot as he went. Basketballs bounced significantly different from soccer balls but Yeonjun must not have gotten such a memo based on how he moved. Beomgyu sped up his pace to a half-jog in an attempt to put some much needed distance between them but Yeonjun bounced the basketball off of his chest and then dribbled it between his shoes like an ace soccer player making a mad dash to the goal.

In other words, he kept up with Beomgyu.

Complete and total nonsense. 

How was Yeonjun even doing that anyway? But, really, honestly, truly,  _ why _ ?

Not even breathless, Yeonjun raised his voice, “We were talking about asking you to join our club.”

“The Magical Boy Raising Project Club,” Beomgyu asked. He turned the corner at the end of the hall and found the stairs that would lead him to the main doors of the gym building.

“The Uncanny Magic-Users Club,” Yeonjun called after him.

And now that Beomgyu paid enough attention to the stupid name, he realized something that probably should have been obvious from the very start. “Are you saying that you all can use magic?”

“Duh.” Yeonjun did a trick, bouncing the ball off of the heel of his shoe, sending it up and over his head. He bent backwards a little to bounce it against his chest as he started down the stairs.

Beomgyu questioned, “Are you saying that I can use magic?”

Yeonjun somehow managed to walk the stairs yet continue to bounce the basketball off of his bare knees. “Duh.”

“That’s stupid,” said Beomgyu.

“No. It’s Uncanny,” Yeonjun corrected. Then he said, grinning, “I’ve figured out a name for this problem of yours.” 

“What problem?”

Yeonjun used his knee to thunk the ball high into the air so he could balance it on his head. “This is The Case Of Being Directed In Misdirecting Directions.”

“What are you talking about? Can you at least attempt to make sense?”

“You wanted to go to the cafeteria. You wound up at the gym,” Yeonjun explained. “You’ve been misdirected.”

Beomgyu wanted to reach out a hand, thwack the basketball and send it careening towards the wall, anything to annoy Yeonjun, anything to wipe that cocky smirk off his face, but then Beomgyu reached the bottom of the staircase and Yeonjun simply  _ wasn’t there _ anymore.

But Beomgyu was getting used to this now. Sadly. 

Yeonjun was still probably across campus, walking down the staircase towards the gym’s main doors. Beomgyu, on the other hand, now found himself standing at the top of the concrete steps at the back door of the auditorium where the school band performed.

“Gosh, now I’m  _ outside _ ,” Beomgyu loudly complained. 

“Whoa,” came a startled voice. “How did you do that?”

Beomgyu looked down.

Sitting on the stairs immediately below him, a half-eaten sandwich clutched tightly in his hands, choking and struggling to swallow, was another of Beomgyu’s schoolmates.

Beomgyu didn’t recognize him and he was actually slightly disappointed that this guy wasn’t one of the members of the Winx Club. Beomgyu squatted down and slapped a hand hard on the guy’s back. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he stated.

The guy managed to choke down his food. He slapped a hand over his chest to catch his breath. “Dude,” he managed. He used the cuff of his dress shirt to wipe off his mouth. “You came out of nowhere. I mean, you just--” He gestured with his hand and nearly dropped his sandwich in the process. “You just  _ poofed _ outta nowhere. There wasn’t even a flash or some sparkles or anything.”

Beomgyu glanced around. This was a pretty secluded spot. Far from any main doors or paths. How did he talk his way out of this? “Uhhh. I’ve been here,” he lied.

“I was watching the whole time,” the guy rebutted. He was handsome, with big eyes and thick eyebrows and a smile that took up half his face. “Like… I was kinda sitting like this, turned this way.” He shifted a bit, almost bringing the two of them face to face. “I was waiting for someone, you see. I mean, it’s not like I’m all of the way out here eating lunch by myself like a loser. That would be pathetic.” He forced out a staccato laugh. “It’s not like I don’t have any friends or anything. Like, who even has problems like that anymore?” 

This sounded like something Beomgyu didn’t want to get involved in. He stood up. 

“Don’t go. Don’t you want to sit with me? I’ve got another sandwich. PB&J.” 

“I have friends to sit with,” Beomgyu said, starting down the stairs. And he definitely meant Sunghoon and Riki from the Chess Club. Not those four loons from the Mystery Dungeon Club.

The kid didn’t let up. He shouted after Beomgyu, “Do you know magic? Because what you just did was magic, right? I was watching the whole time and then you just  _ appeared _ .”

Beomgyu glanced over his shoulder. He squinted. He could just barely make out the syllables on the name tag crookedly pinned to the guy’s unbuttoned blazer. Jaeyun. “I walked over here,” he lied. “You must have blinked or something.”

Jaeyun shook his head. “No. I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen stuff like this happen on campus before.” He watched as Beomgyu turned around and kept down the stairs. He panicked. “I have wings.”

That made Beomgyu pause. He nearly stumbled on the stairs. “Wait. What?” 

Jaeyun stood up. “Do you want to see them? They’re under my shirt.” 

It upset Beomgyu a little that his first thought was ‘what kind of wings?’ and not ‘you think you have wings?’ Okay. He definitely needed to go.

“Wait,” Jaeyun called after him. “Don’t go!”

But Beomgyu was good at going so he kept going. Wings? Impossible. And even if it  _ was _ possible, Beomgyu didn’t want to get involved. He just wanted to eat lunch and go to class and be normal.

The kid kept shouting at his back. Kept begging him to stop and turn around. There was a whoosh of wind. Either the unfurling of wings or the impeccable timing of a breeze but, either way, Beomgyu didn’t stop. He didn’t turn around. He rushed to the bottom of the concrete stairs and--

\--wound up on the landing of the carpeted stairs that separated the school library’s second story from its first.

Again, he was in an entirely different building. On an entirely different section of campus. And now he was even farther away from the cafeteria than he was five seconds ago.

He was immediately spotted.

Two of the boys from the club rushed up the stairs towards him.

“There he is,” yelled Taehyun, pointing.

Kai immediately shushed him. “We’re in a library.” Then, to Beomgyu, he said, “Wait there.”

Taehyun blinked his eyes rapidly up at Beomgyu, as if he couldn’t be sure if he should trust what he saw. “The game’s definitely afoot. It’s time to unravel.”

Beomgyu didn’t even know what that meant. “I don’t know what that means.”

“We’ve been looking all over for you,” Taehyun told Beomgyu, ignoring his protests. They joined him on the landing, poking him and tugging at his clothes as if to make sure he was alright.

“Well, I was looking all over for you,” Kai cut in. “Even walked all the way over to the science lab. But then I thought to ask Taehyun about all of this. And as soon as I found him, we found you.”

Beomgyu wasn’t sure he’d asked for an explanation. But, still, he decided to add a bit of his own. “I was with…” Well, did they know Jaeyun? Did they know he had wings? Allegedly? Supposedly? “I was with Yeonjun up until two seconds ago. He called this The Case Of The Blah Blah Blah.”

“Interesting,” said Taehyun. He flipped through the pages of the book in his hand. “First Kai. Then Yeonjun. Then me. I wonder if the stairs are leading you to other Uncanny Magic-Users on purpose, then.”

And that sparked a bit of confusion in Beomgyu. “Wait. You all aren’t the only ones with magic?”

“Of course not,” Kai said, waving a dismissive hand. “We’re just the only ones in the club so far.”

Beomgyu thought of Riki. He thought of Jaeyun. “Are you going to recruit all of the magical people into the club?” 

Kai shrugged. “Only if they want to help us solve problems.” Then he gave Beomgyu a bit more of his attention. “Why? Is there anyone else you want to bring on board?”

“No,” Beomgyu said quickly. Too quickly.

Kai furrowed his eyebrows suspiciously.

Fortunately, Taehyun spoke up. “You know I’m picky about group numbers. Three is weak, even if triangles are supposed to be naturally strong. Four is a balanced dynamic but still a little unstable. Five is strong and solid. I like five. Didn’t we decide on five? Five is good. There is no longer a center if there’s six but there  _ is _ a center if there’s seven. Don’t you understand? With eight--”

“Okay, I get it,” Kai cut him off, holding up a hand.

Taehyun didn’t mind the interruption. He flipped through more pages of his weird little book and stared at complicated diagrams and multi-colored charts and walls of text like he could easily understand it all. 

That book was the same one he’d been skimming through yesterday in the club room, Beomgyu realized. At a distance, it looked like any regular, slightly tattered geometry textbook. Up close, it looked like a bulky, leather-bound spellbook. Like something out of a fantasy video game. The letters on the cover even glowed before Beomgyu’s eyes. And it was odd how Beomgyu could look at this book and at the book he saw yesterday and recognize them as the same thing when they appeared entirely different. 

Perhaps he was slowly starting to figure out how this Uncanny stuff worked. 

And he wasn’t sure he liked that idea. 

Taehyun said, “Kai told me that the stairs snatched you so I’ve been trying to figure out the cause. When did you first experience this problem?”

Beomgyu skeptically repeated, “The stairs… snatched me?”

Kai nodded. “It’s not all that uncommon. People get lost in places that should be familiar to them all of the time. Don’t fret.”

And now that Beomgyu thought about it, all of his difficulties today were tied to stairways. “I’m just trying to eat lunch,” he huffed.

Kai peered over the railing of the staircase and squinted at the clock downstairs. “You’ve still got half an hour.”

“It’s gonna take me half an hour to get there,” Beomgyu whined. “Do you know how many staircases there are between here and the cafeteria?” 

“Yeah, this school wasn’t really designed to accommodate physically disabled people,” said Kai with a stern face. 

That hadn’t been the point Beomgyu was trying to make but it was still a good one. “There’s at least a hundred of them between here and the cafeteria,” he kept complaining. Exaggerating.

“Hmm. Perhaps if you lined them all up and laid them all out,” said Taehyun, biting his bottom lip in serious thought. “Though if we’re talking about the  _ number _ of stairs, I’d put it closer to the thousands.”

And it kind of irritated Beomgyu that Taehyun was the most neatly dressed and well-put-together of all of them but he was just as looney as the rest. Loonier, even. Maybe Kai was the only normal one.

Maybe Beomgyu didn’t have this as figured out as he thought he did.

“You should sit with us,” Kai insisted.

“At lunch?” Beomgyu just wanted to be done with this. He just wanted to be done with them. “If I can even make it there.”

Taehyun closed the book in his hands and wedged it beneath one arm. “Based on my research, the stairs are just doing what you want them to do. Like most stairs do.”

“I don’t follow,” Beomgyu admitted.

“They are taking you from one place to another. One level to another,” Taehyun clarified.

Except it wasn’t much of a clarification at all.

“You don’t really want to go to the cafeteria, do you,” Kai asked, straightforward.

Going to the cafeteria meant having to sit with these clowns. “No,” Beomgyu stated. “I really don’t.”

Kai shrugged. “Then that means you can’t go to the cafeteria.”

Taehyun said, “I’ve been looking up ways to work through this and all I can think of is-- Hey, don’t go back up the stairs!”

But Beomgyu was already halfway up them, running like something was after him. If he went back the way he came, surely he’d wind up back at the auditorium with wing boy or back at the gym with Yeonjun! But such a theory was put to the test and then promptly flunked that test when he made it to the top of the staircase. Instead of appearing in any of the places he had already been, like he fully expected, he was on the fifth floor of the main building, right in front of the off-limits door to the school roof.

Great. Just great.

Beomgyu groaned in frustration. Screw not making it to the cafeteria in time. He wouldn’t even make it to his next class!

What if he got stuck on these staircases forever? Would he even make it home today?

Beomgyu slapped his cheeks with his hands. He was dreaming. He’d wake up in World History with drool all over his notes and, honestly, really, that would be  _ okay _ compared to this.

“There you are,” came a smooth, calming voice.

There wasn’t any hostility in their tone, but Beomgyu still expected to be in a place like this alone. He jumped halfway out of his skin. “Who’s there?”

“Just me.” Then Soobin stepped out of the shadows.

It shouldn’t have been a swoon-worthy moment at all, surrounded by dusty stacks of broken school desks with the faint, stale stench of sneakily-smoked cigarettes in the air. But when Soobin sauntered out of the dark and into the sunlight pouring in through the window, Beomgyu was swept away. The fact that the guy was so cute kind of balanced out the fact that he had such weird friends. 

Beomgyu asked, “How did you know where to find me?”

“I didn’t,” said Soobin. “Not exactly. Not specifically. But the center stairwell is the one spot that has the most staircases on campus.” He waved a hand towards the iron railing where, if one looked down, they could see to the ground floor. “So if I kept an eye out, maybe I’d spot you… because there was a very high chance you’d end up here. Eventually. Maybe.”

And it made no sense but it made perfect sense. “I think Taehyun said the staircases were bringing me to other magical people.”

“Ahh, he’s probably right about that, then.” Soobin stopped directly in front of Beomgyu. “Uncanny things usually only get Uncanny people involved.”

Ok. That still made sense. Not everything was going over Beomgyu’s head. “I’m guessing the other guys told you what was going on?”

“Yeah. We’ve been doing this for a while so we work pretty quickly. This makes, like, our fiftieth case or something like that.” 

Beomgyu nodded slowly. “So you’ll eventually have your hundredth case or whatever? Your thousandth?”

“Yeah. Eventually. Maybe. It would actually be more worrying if all of this stuff suddenly stopped happening.”

“So you’ll help me?”

“Of course, Beomgyu. We’re already on it. As soon as we name a case, we see it through to the end.”

Beomgyu had reached his limit for the amount of time he could look Soobin in the eye. He dropped his gaze to the floor. “How’d you find out about me so fast,” he had to know. “How are you already up here waiting for me?”

Soobin shrugged. “It’s simple. I ran into Kai in the hall a few minutes back. He said something Uncanny was going on and that you were possibly at the center of it. He said he’d find Taehyun. By then, Yeonjun was calling and giving me his own theory on the situation,” Soobin explained.

In other words, the news had traveled all the way up to the top of the grapevine. Much like Beomgyu had to somehow find a way to travel all the way down to the cafeteria.

“Wow, you guys really do work fast,” Beomgyu commented. Recharged on the eye contact meter, he looked up to meet Soobin’s gaze. “It can’t have been but ten minutes since class let out.”

“We are efficient.” Then Soobin asked, “You’re trying to go to the cafeteria?”

“It’s lunchtime. Where else would I go?” But… “Yes. I’m starving, actually.”

Soobin smiled. The sunlight coming in through the nearest window streaked through his vibrant blue hair and, maybe just maybe, he sparkled a little. Like genuinely, actually  _ shimmered _ . But then again, he was magic, so… that explained that. Soobin said, “Let’s go together. Perhaps the stairs will let you end up in the place where you want to go if you have someone there to anchor you. If you’re grounded by someone who wants to go someplace slightly more than you do.”

And Beomgyu didn’t know what any of that meant, or if it was an insult or not, but Soobin said something so ridiculous in such an even and steady tone that Beomgyu immediately believed him. “Okay,” he agreed.

Soobin held out his hand.

Beomgyu misinterpreted. “Are-- Hold on. Are you  _ charging _ me?” Were the club members extortioners? Were they going to charge him for the classroom thing the other day as well? He put a hand into his back pocket. “I usually use my card for everything. I’m not even sure I have change for a--”

“I’m just theorizing here, but we should be physically connected,” Soobin cut him off. He held his hand up a little higher. “Or you’ll just float off again. Like a balloon.”

Beomgyu belatedly understood his meaning. Bewildered, he asked, “We should… Wait. Are you saying that…” He couldn’t even get the words out. “Are you suggesting we should, you know, walk across campus holding hands?” He’d rather pay money.

Soobin shrugged, like he hadn’t put that much thought to it. “Is that a bad thing?”

“Not particularly… I don’t think. Not really. No. But what if people think we’re, like, together or something?”

“But we are together, aren’t we?”

“No. I mean _ together _ -together.” Dammit. Now he was talking like Yeonjun!

Soobin merely repeated, “Is that a bad thing?”

And that kind of caught Beomgyu off guard. Even more than any of this Uncanny magic stuff.

“We could attempt to make you an anchor from scratch,” Soobin explained, “and even though Kai is good with crafts, it’ll take a while. Longer than lunch, at least.” He got this really determined look on his face. “I really think it’ll be easier if we test my theory immediately and try the stairs. If you still zip off someplace else, all of us can come up with a new strategy.”

“Well, when you put it like that.” Since Beomgyu didn’t have a better argument than that, he reached out and took Soobin’s hand. It was large and warm and lotiony soft and seemed to swallow Beomgyu’s own, but Soobin’s hand was also ridiculously  _ comfortable _ , as if there were no better place for Beomgyu’s fingers than right where they were, interlocked with Soobin’s own.

They started down the stairs. Slowly. Cautiously. As if one misstep could send one or either of them to opposite ends of campus.

“How long have you been dealing with this Uncanny stuff,” Beomgyu asked to break the odd quiet between them.

“Hmm, since I started high school,” Soobin said. “Maybe a little earlier. I kinda stumbled directly into it. You know. I fell in head-first. Eyeball deep. But Taehyun’s apparently been stepping in it since he was in elementary.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you know? Uncanny things only happen in or around schools. Isn’t that odd? Taehyun’s been researching the reason for years now.”

“Are the answers in that book of his?” Beomgyu meant it as a mean joke but apparently he was right.

“Yeah. His book has the answers to everything. All the work he has to do comes from finding the right page.”

“How long has he had the book?”

“Now _ that _ I don’t have the answer to. You should ask him directly.”

“Ahh, I’d rather not.” Beomgyu clicked his tongue. “How long has the club been around?”

“Oh, we just started that this semester. It was only Taehyun and I at first. One of our first cases was helping Kai find all of the pieces of himself. He joined us after that. Yeonjun joined not long after.” And then, after a heavy pause, he added, “And now there’s you.”

_ Let’s not say anything hasty _ , Beomgyu thought, but aloud, he said, “We’ll see.” He still hadn’t agreed to joining any other extracurricular activities. Chess Club was his lifeblood. All of his friends were there. 

It dawned on Beomgyu that they were moving so slowly, so leisurely, so cautiously, that even after all of this time, they were only now reaching the first landing. He was still in the stairwell. Still with Soobin. He hadn’t been yoinked to another side of campus. “Should we… speed things up,” Beomgyu wondered. “We’ve still got half a building to walk and there’s still lunch to sit and eat.”

Soobin looked over at him. “Why should we rush? It’s not like the cafeteria’s going anywhere.” Then he added. “This time.”

Okay. The curiosity was killing him. “What happened to the cafeteria?”

“It got up and moved to the roof,” said Soobin. “But we didn’t know that until we’d tried every door on campus. It took us half the night.”

“Gotcha,” Beomgyu said. He didn’t get it. This would move faster if he just rolled with it.

“Kai made something strong and tied it down. It hasn’t moved since.”

“That makes sense,” Beomgyu said, though he wasn’t sure it did make sense.

They reached the bottom of the staircase that led to the roof but instead of winding up anywhere else, like in the Home Ec room or in the art room or something kooky, Beomgyu was on the landing of the fourth floor where he should be. Soobin was still at his side. And they were still holding hands. Something that wasn’t a problem up in the tiny, deserted little off-limits section by the fifth floor roof door but was kind of a problem now that they were surrounded by groups and clusters of their schoolmates.

Immediately, Beomgyu became aware of the heads swiveling towards them as Soobin casually took them down the next flight of stairs. 

Every time Beomgyu wanted to dart off and hide, Soobin tightened his grip on Beomgyu’s hand and gave him a dazzling, dimpled smile. Between floor four and floor three and then between floor three and floor two, Beomgyu’s priorities shifted. He stopped caring about the whispers and stares and giggles and started caring about the fact that he could walk down a flight of stairs without winding up someplace else. 

Talk about an achievement!

“I think your little trick or theory or whatever is working,” said Beomgyu. They had made it to the very bottom of the stairwell and were now walking down the first floor corridor towards the cafeteria. Not once had Beomgyu wound up in an entirely different building. “How did we do that? How did we walk down all of those stairs?” And since people were looking and gawking at him anyway, he didn’t care that he was being loud and mildly obnoxious. “How did we  _ do _ that?” He jumped up and down. “What trick did you use? Is there some huge secret I don’t know?”

“I told you before,” Soobin said, “you just had to be with someone who wanted to be somewhere slightly more than you did. It was the only way the stairs would have let you pass.”

“Hmm,” Beomgyu thought about it. Not in a logical, sensible way, but in the most obtuse and Uncanny way he could muster. “Did the stairs really send me all willy-nilly just because I was unsure about eating lunch with you guys?”

“It’s uncanny how Uncanny magic works,” was Soobin’s not-really-an-explanation.

“I’m actually kind of afraid to know where you want to be that bad.” Beomgyu took a moment to ponder it. He raised his voice a little to be heard over the din of voices and laughter around them. “Unless you also wanted to go to the cafeteria really bad?”

“Hmm, not particularly. Let me get that.” Soobin pulled forward a bit so that he could pull open the cafeteria doors for the both of them.

“Okay. So that means you wanted to go somewhere else,” Beomgyu theorized. He was so caught up in the conversation that he forgot that he was walking into the crowded cafeteria holding hands with someone as weird and bright-blue-haired as Soobin. “Would the stairs work if we wanted to go to different places?”

“Of course they would,” Soobin told him. “Stairs let whole crowds of people go to entirely different places all of the time.” 

Huh. Maybe Beomgyu wasn’t getting the hang of this Uncanny stuff like he thought.

And maybe he wore his frustration plainly on his face because Soobin said, “Magic’s not as complicated and layered as you think. You just have to go with the flow. It’s more about feeling than thinking.”

Hmmm. That was gonna be a mild problem then. “I’ll leave all the magical problem solving to you guys.”

“You’ll get the hang of it. Trust me, you’ll be a real asset to the team in no time.”

Beomgyu didn’t really appreciate that Soobin was making it seem like Beomgyu had already agreed to join their weirdo club but now that he’d walked from one end of the cafeteria to the other at Soobin’s side, he was slowly starting to think that these guys weren’t as weird as he thought they were. They were still weird, don’t get him wrong! Just not _ as _ weird. There was a difference!

“Over there,” said Soobin. He had spotted Yeonjun and Taehyun and Kai sitting at a table near the rear of the cafeteria and waved back when Kai waved at them.

“Let’s get back to what we were talking about earlier. The anchor thing. Where did you want to go,” Beomgyu asked him. “I mean, like, if you had to want to be somewhere more than I wanted to be somewhere… Where did you want to be so badly?”

“At your side,” Soobin announced. Smoothly. 

Huh? Was that… weird? Or not?

“Oh,” said Beomgyu. Because this seemed like one of those immense, poignant situations in which everything changed so the only way to respond to it was with a surprised  _ oh _ . “Oh.” The floor giving out beneath him and sending him plummeting into the center of the earth wouldn’t have put as many butterflies in his stomach as he felt at that moment. “Oh.”

“Did you want to sit with us,” Kai asked, watching the two of them approach the table and not even commenting on the fact that they were holding hands.

“Sure, why not,” Beomgyu answered.

Then he and Soobin sat down for lunch.

  
  
  
  


**2:55 PM.**

School had just let out for the day but Beomgyu should have known that coming into contact with Those Four Guys meant that he wouldn’t be able to go straight home after class. He should have known.

He should have  _ known _ !

Beomgyu was almost to the front doors of the main school building when he heard, “Beomgyu, wait. Before you go…” from off to his right. The tone was so cool, so casual, so comfortable, so familiar, that it  _ had _ to be one of the weirdos.

His heart sinking with dread, Beomgyu turned, fully expecting to see smiley Kai or smirky Yeonjun, but-- “Huh?” He blinked up at the unfamiliar student quickly approaching him. “Are you talking to me?”

The tall stranger stopped right beside him. Sure, it was April, but the weather was quickly warming this week. That made the guy’s puffy jacket stand out quite conspicuously. Particularly since he had the hood on, low over most of his face, even though he was indoors. The guy blinked once, his dark brown eyes almost comically magnified beneath his rectangular, strong-prescription glasses. Instead of saying anything that would make sense given the situation, the guy said, “We have 14 Minhyuks on campus, 11 Taehyungs, 9 Jinwoos, 8 Hyunjins, 7 Minhos, 5 Jaemins and 4 Kais.”

Beomgyu looked out of the glass front door. He was still holding it half-open and the refreshing breeze billowed over his face. He smelled fresh-cut grass on the wind. He stared out at the sunny afternoon sky. At all of the regular, absolutely normal kids leaving campus for the day. Then Beomgyu turned back towards this not-normal guy. “And,” he asked. “What about it?”

“We only have one Beomgyu on campus.”

It took a moment, but Beomgyu realized the guy had, in the most useless, nonsensical, long-winded and roundabout way possible, answered Beomgyu’s initial question. He turned back around to face the outdoors. This guy was making fun of him. “You could have just agreed that, yes, you were talking to me.”

“I at least thought you’d be capable of recognizing your own name.”

Beomgyu was about to get dizzy from how much spinning around he was doing. He faced the guy yet again. Met his eyes. 

The stranger was lean-framed with a skinnyish nose and a longish face with high cheekbones. The kind of face you didn’t just casually forget because he was handsome in such a striking way. The kind of face that belonged to the pretty people who modeled ‘as a hobby’ but, in reality, had a burgeoning fashion career ahead of them. The kind of face that belonged to the kind of person who usually went out of their way to avoid speaking to people like Beomgyu. Beomgyu asked, “Uhhh, do I know you?”

“The name’s Lee Heeseung,” said Heeseung. He offered a smile. A small one. A nervous one. “And I would hope you know me. Seeing as we’re in the same class and all.” 

Welp. This was embarrassing. Beomgyu didn’t know him at all. Could only vaguely recall his face. Maybe he sat way in the back of the room? Or maybe he sat way in the front?

Heeseung said, “Can we step away from the doors, please? We’re blocking foot traffic.”

“Suuuure,” Beomgyu slowly agreed. He followed Heeseung away from the harsh rectangles of sunlight pouring in through the glass doors to a slightly more shadowy cranny behind a pillar in the hall. Maybe because the guy was in a hooded jacket but this felt a little shady. “What can I do for you, man?”

Then Heeseung said the last thing Beomgyu was expecting: “Can you help me set up a consultation with the rest of the Uncanny Magic-Users Club?”

“Uhhhh….” Someone like  _ Heeseung _ wanted to meet with  _ them _ ? And, on top of that, he’d said ‘the rest.’ As if implying Beomgyu were part of that crowd. “I’m gonna go,” said Beomgyu, turning to leave.

Heeseung grabbed his arm to keep him from stepping too far away. “Please,” the guy begged, a tad screechy. “I know you guys are hard to get a hold of but this is urgent.”

_ You guys _ . As in Beomgyu and the rest of them. As in Beomgyu And The Weirdos. Oh no. Oh noooo. Beomgyu was about to ask how anyone knew he was associated with those guys in the first place but then remembered how he and Soobin had paraded into the cafeteria hand in hand. And it was impossible to ignore Soobin with his stupidly blue but stupidly pretty hair.

Still. Beomgyu wasn’t a member of the club no matter which way the bread was sliced.

“Just go to the--” Beomgyu started, but he snapped his mouth shut. It wasn’t a club day. The guys wouldn’t be in the club room. Resigned, he let out a sigh so deep, stars twinkled in his vision from the oxygen deprivation. “Follow me, I guess,” he grumbled once he’d sucked in a breath. He had an idea where one of them might be.

“Thank you, thank you,” Heeseung squealed. “You don’t know how much this means to me. I really don’t know who else to turn to. I mean, is there even anyone else on campus equipped to handle these kinds of situations? Even the Student Council doesn’t have an answer through official, documented means.” He was tall and seemed like the confident type at a glance, but Heeseung trailed behind Beomgyu, hunched over to make himself small, like a lost puppy who’d imprinted, rambling and rambling to keep the nerves away. “I mean, who else would I even  _ turn to _ in a situation like this? Without you guys, I would be in quite the bind. Under most normal circumstances, I would just put up with things until it all blew over but I think this is one of those problems that gets bigger the longer you ignore it. I don’t know if I told you this, but I’ve already ignored this problem all day. I’m hoping it’s still something that can be easily solved. I don’t usually pay attention to a lot of gossip, but I heard that there are a few people on campus who make dealing with these kinds of things their specialty. Hueningkai is a member of your group, correct? I’m unfamiliar with the others but I do know the two of you.”

They’d reached the end of the hall when Beomgyu hit his limit. “You’re going, like, slightly overboard, my dude,” Beomgyu told him. “Totally off the rails.” The guy was kinda acting like someone like Kai (of all people) was capable of saving lives or something.

“Sorry, sorry,” squeaked Heeseung. “It’s just that… This thing… This issue I’ve gotten involved in or what have you. It got serious enough today that I had to… That I had to--” He bit one of his knuckles as if he absolutely couldn’t say it. He squeezed his eyes shut and forced out the terrible words. “I had to  _ be late to class _ .”

Beomgyu nearly lost his footing. Nearly fell right over. He recovered by pushing open the door that led outside. “That is a crying shame,” he told the guy, waving him through. “My heart goes out to you.”

Heeseung hesitated for several seconds. He visibly steeled his nerves and then stepped out the door like the outdoors might hurt him. “I can’t have another tardy on my record or it will then count as an absence. And I  _ can’t _ have an absence on my record which is why I need your club’s help.”

Whatever. Whatever! Beomgyu knew he was going to instantly regret asking but since he was developing an awful habit of asking questions he knew he was going to regret hearing the answers to, he asked it anyway. “What’s your problem?”

“Sorry,” Heeseung squeaked out. Even with the shadow of his hood across his face, he got noticeably pink and embarrassed. “Am I not speaking loud enough? Am I--”

Beomgyu cut him off. “No. What’s your  _ magical _ problem?” He led the way towards the next building over. Though the breezeway had a roof over the top, blocking the worst of the wind, Heeseung shrank into his coat like he was terribly cold. Beomgyu continued, “What’s your funny thing? Your not-canny business? Why do you need the help of the club?”

“Oh!” Heeseung started counting things off on his fingers. “There are multiple things wrong with me today that weren’t wrong with me yesterday.”

Beomgyu knew  _ that _ feeling. “Done any teleporting lately?”

“Nope. Can’t say that I have.”

“Lost track of any of your classrooms?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

Okay. So maybe different people had different problems. That… made sense. “Nevermind,” Beomgyu said. He pulled open the door of the gym building and then led Heeseung up the wide, squat flight of stairs to the main corridor. It was chilly outside but it was straight up humid in the gym. The stench of sweat and body odor and cheap body spray and professional cleaner all mixed together into the frankly undeniable scent of youth. In other words, it smelled like after-school sports. To put it even more simply than that, it  _ reeked _ . All of the doors to the gymnasium were wide open and the cacophony of numerous people running about and playing sports filled the hall.

Beomgyu approached one of the doors and peered in. One half of the basketball court was devoted to players doing basketball drills. The other half had players practicing volleyball drills. The ear-grating squeak of dozens of shoes on the waxed floor kinda gave Beomgyu a headache.

This was why he played chess. Can’t get much quieter than that.

“Oh dear,” said Heeseung. “Oh my. Oh no. I hope I don’t have to explain my problem in front of all of these people.”

“You won’t have to. We’re just here for one of my--” Oop. He’d nearly slipped up! “--one of  _ the _ club members.” Then, louder, Beomgyu shouted, “Yeonjun!” A moment slipped past. Then another. “Yeonjun,” he shouted again, cupping his hands around his mouth. There was so much movement and noise in the gym that Beomgyu could hardly hear himself. “Yeonjun!”

Like calling a dog away from playtime at the park, like calling a child away from the afternoon throng at a playground, Yeonjun skipped away from the commotion and came shuffling up to them with a sideways grin on his face. “Yo,” he called out. “How are ya?”

“Doing fine,” said Beomgyu. He looked him up and down. Today, Yeonjun had on the volleyball team’s spiffy orange and white jersey (number 09), but instead of appropriate shorts, he wore his checkered uniform pants, as godawful uncomfortable as that had to be. How on earth could he just  _ do that _ without annoying the absolute snot out of his teammates and coach? Wasn’t there a rule in place? A dress code?

No. Beomgyu was not going to get curious. He was  _ not _ going to ask. “This guy here--” He motioned to his right, where Heeseung had been mere seconds ago, but the boy was gone. For a split second, Beomgyu thought this was Heeseung’s uncanny problem. That he could turn invisible. 

Yeonjun cleared his throat to get Beomgyu’s attention and then made a movement, jutting out his chin.

Beomgyu spun to his left, slightly farther away from where Yeonjun stood, and spotted Heeseung, trembling in his shoes beside him. “This guy has a problem that only you guys can solve.”

“Us guys?”

“The spooky-ooky club,” Beomgyu clarified.

“Hi,” Heeseung attempted, waving.

Yeonjun frowned a little. “Why’d you bring him to me?”

To that, Heeseung ducked his head down.

Beomgyu gritted his teeth. “Because you’re in the club. That’s why I brought him to you.”

“My specialty is inanimate objects,” Yeonjun explained. “Go find Taehyun. He’s the people person.”

“ _ You’re _ not the people person?” Beomgyu couldn’t believe his ears.

Yeonjun lowered his head and pulled his arms behind his back. He dug the toe of his shoe into the floor. “I’m shy.”

Beomgyu was human. He could only roll his eyes but so far. “I’m gonna go.” He didn’t even hesitate before spinning around to leave.

At least Yeonjun shouted directions at his back. “Taehyun’s in the library! Yeah. More than likely. Second floor!”

And Beomgyu was so caught up in exiting the building that he nearly forgot he was supposed to be taking Heeseung with him until the guy called out from behind him, “Wait for me.”

This was turning into a disaster. A right old cesspit of ridiculousness. Beomgyu wanted to ask Heeseung what his magical problem was, figure out what was ailing him, help him solve his troubles, but asking meant he was interested. And even though he  _ was _ interested he didn’t actually want to  _ be _ interested. Being interested meant he’d have to spend more time with the Cuckoo-Clock Club than he wanted to.

The two of them left the gym’s front doors and stepped outside.

Next to him, Heeseung let out a borderline animalistic screech and hid beneath his hood, yanking his sleeves down over his hands.

Weirdos attract weirdos, it seemed. 

There had to be a scientific law about that. He should have paid more attention in Advanced Physics! 

Gah. Why were  _ all of them _ so weird? Even the ones that weren’t in the club! 

And Beomgyu was gonna wind up in the middle of this nonsense if he didn’t  _ get out of here _ . “Don’t you know where the library is?” He’d just point the way and then go home.

“Yeah, technically,” Heeseung said. 

“What do you mean ‘yeah, technically?’ You either know the way or--” He turned to look at Heeseung but instantly regretted it. “--or you don’t.” 

“I know exactly where it is.” Heeseung was covering his face with both of his sleeves. “But I can’t see where I’m going.”

“Hmm. I wonder why,” huffed Beomgyu.

“If you could figure out why, that would be fantastic.”

“It’s because you’re--” Beomgyu motioned to Heeseung’s raised arms, his covered face. “Nevermind.” He tugged on the hem of Heeseung’s puffy coat and pulled him towards the library building. “Ugh. Come on,” he groaned. Why did he have to be so nice?

He should work on getting meaner.

Beomgyu pulled his phone out of his back pocket and checked the time. He legit could have been almost home by now. Only a block or two away at this rate. But at least the two of them didn’t have to go through too many more buildings to get to the library at the edge of campus. And at least Heeseung pulled his arms away from his face once they were inside.

Fortunately, Taehyun wasn’t hard to spot once they’d gotten to the second floor.

Not because he was floating through the air or had sprouted bird wings or something foolish and Uncanny, but because he was standing at the top of the staircase like he was waiting for them. “Yeonjun texted me,” he explained. “Said you’d be this way.”

“Cool,” Beomgyu sighed. “Can we sit? I walked from one end of campus to the other and I’m dog tired.”

Taehyun motioned towards a study table near the big window. The surface was covered from one end to the other in a multitude of reference books. He said, “Have a seat in my office.” 

Beomgyu took a step forward.

Heeseung resisted. “Can we sit somewhere with a bit less direct sunlight?”

Beomgyu wanted to scream. Instead, he just calmly, lowly, asked, “Why?” 

Taehyun must have been used to this, though. Wordlessly, he led the way to another study table a few aisles down, closer to the audiobook section. The table was empty and sat in a quiet little nook and must have been recently wiped off because the surface smelled faintly of citrus cleaning products. Taehyun sat down first. Heeseung, fortunately, sat next to him. That left Beomgyu all the room on the opposite side of the table. He accepted the free space gratefully, all but collapsing onto the chair.

“So tell me, what’s your problem,” Taehyun asked.

“The game’s definitely afoot,” Beomgyu jeered.

The other two boys ignored him. 

Heeseung slowly pulled his hood off of his head, revealing cute, brownish, curly hair. “I’m having so many problems. Where should I start?”

Beomgyu told himself that he was only sticking around because he was tired. Not because he was interested in whatever Heeseung’s sickness was.

“Preferably, start at the beginning,” Taehyun prompted. There had been a pen tucked behind his ear this whole time. He grabbed it, twirled it around his fingers and then made a move as if to write, only to forget that he wasn’t at his usual table. “Beomgyu?”

“Yeah,” Beomgyu asked, folding his arms beneath his head and getting ready to pretend to nap.

“Can you go get my book? I’m sure you know which one I’m talking about.”

Beomgyu remained seated, cradling his head in his arms. If he just kept his eyes shut tight, maybe he actually could catch a nap.

“Pretty please,” Taehyun amended. He even reached across the table to thump Beomgyu on the crown of his head. “With sugar on top?” When Beomgyu still didn’t move, Taehyun added. “And sprinkles in assorted colors?”

“Fine.” Beomgyu stood up, trying not to look too eager. He stepped away, moved down the library aisles to the reference section where Taehyun’s usual table stood.

The book was easy to spot. If only because it had taken on its huge, leather bound spellbook form and the gold clasp gleamed in the pinkish-orange afternoon light. Sitting next to all of the other textbooks and notebooks and research materials, the thing looked out of place. Like it was from a different time. A different world. Beomgyu hoisted the thing up with one hand and then grunted. He tried again with both hands and got it up off of the table. It was heavier than it looked. Heavier than he expected considering a scrawny guy like Taehyun carried it around effortlessly. It even had a nice smell. Like fresh ink and a brand new book. And the leather of the cover was warm and slightly fuzzy to the touch as if, if he waited long enough, he’d feel the book take a breath. Beomgyu flipped it open. He’d seen the contents of the silvery-gold pages from a distance: glittering graphs and shimmering spreadsheets, long stretches of tantalizing texts and mesmerizing maps. Up close, it still kind of looked like that, except the glow of the letters stung Beomgyu’s eyes a little. Like he was staring into a too-bright light source. And when he squinted a bit against the shine of the letters to stare at the pages as he flipped through them, some of the paragraphs seemed to fade in and out, drift across the page, swirl into creation. When Beomgyu’s eyes unfocused and the words stilled for long enough, he discovered that the letters and numbers were from a strange, unfamiliar alphabet system. One that he was positive that regular people, no matter what country they were from, couldn’t read.

Where did Taehyun get such a thing?

“Beomgyu,” came a soft voice.

He heard it. He really did. But the sound was distant. Like a song playing from the next room over. Like a dream he’d just woke up from yet could hardly remember. 

“Beomgyu?”

He wanted to respond to the voice. He truly did! But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t reply. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t turn his head. The words in the book felt like they were branding themselves onto his brain but he couldn’t make heads or tails of the jumbled sentences. It was worse than the later chapters of his Advanced Physics textbook.

“Beomgyu!” A hand came into Beomgyu’s field of view and he watched it, almost distantly, as it closed the book.

As soon as the dastardly thing was shut, Beomgyu felt like he’d been snapped back into reality. He felt like he was back in his body again. Back in the library. Back at school. His eyes still stung and he had a mild headache from whatever unwieldy magic he’d just been subjected to, but he could still see Soobin standing in front of him, clear as day. Blue-haired, brown-eyed and bright-smiled. 

“It’s you,” Beomgyu said, voice strained.

“I’m glad to see you too,” Soobin responded.

That hadn’t really been what Beomgyu meant but he wouldn’t argue the point. There was no telling what would have happened if Soobin hadn’t come across him just then.

Soobin must have spotted the worried expression on his face as he stared at the cover of the book. “I wouldn’t put my head in that.” Soobin let out a cute little chuckle. “Unless you ask Taehyun to teach you how to Read.”

And Beomgyu’s knee-jerk response was to insist that he obviously knew how to read, but he could tell by the way that Soobin said it that it meant something else entirely when referring to this particular book. 

Beomgyu let go of the book with one hand so that he could place that hand on top of Soobin’s. He could feel the warmth of it. The softness of it. If he pressed down a little bit, he could feel Soobin’s pulse. Beomgyu squeezed his fingers tight around Soobin’s hand and pulled it off of the book’s front cover. Even the title was hard to look at with it’s strange, glowing letters. Beomgyu flipped it over in his hands so that he wouldn’t have to look at any of it. “Do you know how to Read it?”

“No. Though I’ve sat down and tried numerous times.” Soobin hummed. A low, scratchy sound like he was deep in thought. “Taehyun tried to teach all of us at one point over the semester but, like, Yeonjun’s too busy with extracurricular activities and Kai doesn’t see anything at all when Taehyun opens the book for him.” Soobin put a finger on Beomgyu’s chin and tilted his head back so that they could look at each other. “Maybe Taehyun will have better luck teaching you. Hmm?”

“Hmmm,” Beomgyu mumbled. He pulled just far enough away that Soobin’s pretty fingers were no longer pressed against his chin. “Maybe.” But being taught how to Read implied spending a lot of time with the club members and Beomgyu, despite everything that had happened over the last two days, was still adamant about not wanting to have any part of this. “Oh yeah. He wanted me to bring this to him.” Oddly enough, a conversation about the book had made him forget about the book.

Soobin trailed behind him as Beomgyu led the way back to the table in the far corner.

“Ahh, Soobin,” Taehyun greeted, holding up a hand in greeting. “Just in time. The game’s afoot and it’s time to unravel.”

Beomgyu was still positive that such a catchphrase didn’t make sense and that Taehyun needed to stop trying to make it happen. He eased down into his chair and slid the book across the table to Taehyun, who immediately spun it around and flipped it open as if he knew exactly which page the answers were on.

Soobin asked, “What have you discovered?” He sat down next to Beomgyu at the table.

Taehyun looked over at their schoolmate. “Repeat your symptoms, Heeseung, if you’d be so kind.”

Heeseung looked too nervous to do such a thing. He was likely to vibrate right out of his skin with the way he was shaking, but he cleared his throat and said, “I’m losing my sense of taste. Like, I just can’t seem to keep food down. Even water is starting to taste weird to me.” 

Beomgyu piped up, “Are we even capable of handling medical issues? Shouldn’t he go to the nurse’s office?”

Taehyun could have gotten upset with the outburst but he patiently replied, “I thought that as well until he got further down the list. Heeseung? Continue, please.”

Heeseung had been so chatty before when it was just him and Beomgyu but now that there was a group of them, he was struggling to get his words out from between his teeth.

Ahh. No wonder Beomgyu didn’t even know the two of them had been in the same class all of this time.

Heeseung continued, “I’m always cold. Like, never enough to shiver, which would be weird, but I’m cold enough to always be uncomfortable. Bright lights sting my eyes. I’ve got a pretty constant toothache.” He stuck a finger in his mouth right then and there to massage his noticeably irritated gums.

Silence fell over them. A rather abrupt one. A silence Taehyun hadn’t been expecting. He gently elbowed Heeseung in the side. “Show them what you showed me, please.”

Heeseung’s entire face flushed. He pulled a spit-wet finger from his mouth.

Now that Beomgyu paid attention (and yeah, he realized he was way late) Heeseung had actually pulled off that large, obnoxiously puffy jacket of his and had even taken off his orange uniform blazer. 

Heeseung rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt, revealing the strange markings on both of his arms and across the backs of his hands. No, Beomgyu corrected. Not markings. Not tattoos. But something closer to a bruise. Some kind of diseased-looking discoloration. Or maybe even burn marks. It was slightly gross to look at and made a chill jump up Beomgyu’s spine.

Beomgyu sat back in his chair. “Are you sure he doesn’t need a doctor? What on earth are we supposed to do about this?” He was interested in this nonsense. He really was. Somehow. But he  _ wasn’t _ interested. He wasn’t! Swear to God! He should just get up and go home. It was really getting late now and he had plenty of homework to do. But, for some odd reason, he kept sitting there. Rapt. Wanting to see something so weird and foolish to its inevitably wacko end.

“It’s magical,” Taehyun stated firmly. “If you squint, you can see the lines wrapped tight around him.”

When Beomgyu squinted, he couldn’t see anything but Heeseung’s blurred face.

“It doesn’t appear to be a curse,” Soobin said. “Doesn’t really have the right smell for that.” He rubbed his plump bottom lip between his fingers in deep thought. “It is a little on the darker, smokier side, though. A peppery finish.”

Taehyun frantically flipped through his book but it was obvious he wasn’t finding what he was looking for.

“I’m at a bit of a loss,” Soobin admitted. “I haven’t smelled anything like this before.”

Heeseung visibly trembled. “Am I going to be stuck like this? That would be extremely inconvenient, you know. The pain is kind of constant.”

“We’ll figure something out. Don’t you worry,” Taehyun reassured him.

Soobin nodded. “It’s The Case Of The Wicked Not-A-Curse and we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Even though they were tucked deep into their far-off corner, the sun was slowly setting and the angle of the sunlight shining through the window was creeping closer and closer to them.

Heeseung visibly recoiled as the pink-gold light crawled across the table towards him.

Beomgyu scrunched up his face. “What are you? A vampire or something?”

And he’d said it as a joke. He’d said it to be mean. But he must have been right.

“That’s it,” Soobin shouted, slapping the table. This long after school let out, there wasn’t a librarian on duty to shush them. “It’s the early stages of vampirism!” 

Taehyun’s eyes lit up with insight. “You’re right! He laid the symptoms out plain but I didn’t link them together. Good job, Beomgyu.”

“I guess,” Beomgyu said, grimacing. Not liking that he was suddenly at the center of everyone’s attention.

Heeseung, however, had the kind of reaction Beomgyu wasn’t expecting. “Oh! I wouldn’t mind being a vampire.”

The mood at the table shifted very suddenly.

“You don’t want to be a vampire,” Taehyun warned.

“Why not,” Heeseung squeaked out. At first, Beomgyu thought his classmate had sprung out of his chair in anger but, actually, he’d done it to leap farther away from the rectangle of golden sunlight inching steadily closer to where they all sat.

“Well, you won’t be able to eat any of the good cafeteria food,” Soobin said. “Or any food at all, actually.”

“I don’t particularly mind that,” said Heeseung.

“You’ll have to drink blood, obviously,” Taehyun told him.

“That’s something I can probably get used to,” Heeseung countered. He rubbed his tongue over his teeth as if trying to feel for the sharpness of fangs.

“You won’t show up in photographs,” Soobin reminded him, “and you’ll never see yourself in a mirror again.”

“Things I can live without.” Heeseung said. “I’m not self-confident enough to take many selfies anyway.”

Soobin said, “Don’t you know how many doors you won’t be able to go through after this?”

“I’ll just go straight to school and straight home. No biggie.” Heeseung kept on. “My mom can invite me in at home. Maybe one of you can invite me into the school.”

They all fell into silence. In a way, Beomgyu could see where the guy was coming from. He would have preferred to be a werewolf instead of a vampire but he could still see the appeal. There was something mystical about the whole thing. And he would definitely prefer being a vampire to never being able to find his club room or leaping to entirely different buildings whenever he took a flight of stairs. If anything, Heeseung got off kind of lucky here.

Soobin didn’t think so. “You’ll never get any older than eighteen. It’ll be hard to get a job.”

“I can just do some remote tech job. They’re all the rage.”

Taehyun and Soobin continued their verbal launch of reasons and Heeseung continued deflecting each and every one of them. Like he was prepared for this. Like he was already planning his undead life.

But then Beomgyu remembered something Heeseung had said way back in the beginning, back when he’d first approached Beomgyu for help. Beomgyu blurted out, “You won’t be able to come to school.” And it sounded kind of bland and silly when he said it aloud but it must have worked. It must have done something.

Heeseung turned towards him. His easy-going expression hardened with surprise and worry. The angle made his eyes do some weird glowy thing and they got all red and uncomfortable looking. “Why is that?”

Beomgyu pointed to the rectangle of sunlight coming in through the window that Heeseung was, even at that very moment, stepping away from. “Maybe you can pull off the vampire thing in the winter when it’s still dark outside in the mornings but it’s going to be summer soon. There’s no avoiding that.” He pointed at Heeseung’s burn marks. He better understood why Heeseung acted so weird when they were outside. “You clearly can’t go out in sunlight. The world’s a giant air fryer and if you go outdoors, you’re  _ cooked _ .”

And that, of all things, was what made Heeseung reconsider a life of vampirism. “My near-perfect attendance record,” he wailed, collapsing to the floor like he’d lost all feeling in his legs. “Oh dear. Oh my. Goodness me. I don’t want to be a vampire anymore.” He looked up. First at Beomgyu, then over at Soobin, then up at Taehyun. “How do I get rid of this?”

“Simple,” Taehyun said. He slammed shut his book. “We’ll just peel the vampire bites out of you. It’s possible when they’re still fresh. You must have only just got bitten today. Hmmm. Early this morning, more than likely. On your walk to school, perhaps?”

Heeseung tilted his head and thought about it. It took him nearly ten seconds but he came up with something. “There was this weird little dog I passed by near the park. Pretty sure it was a chihuahua.”

“The breed isn’t important here. Do you remember where you got bit,” asked Taehyun. 

“It got me… Hmm. It got me on the ankle but I thought nothing of it. I didn’t think it was all that deep a bite.” 

“Well, it’s less about the bite and more about the transferral of spit,” said Taehyun. He pushed his glasses up his nose.

Heeseung rolled up the hem of his checkered pants and tugged down his sock, burgundy with dried blood, to reveal the four black dots on the skin at the bottom of his calf. They looked like pits of ink. Deep and bottomless. “Maybe I should have been more concerned when the bite didn’t hurt at all.”

Taehyun held out his hand, palm up. “Soobin? Do you have a pair of tweezers?”

Soobin shook his head. “I’ve got nail clippers, though. And a nail file! It’s what I did in Economics today.”

Taehyun held his hand out to Beomgyu instead. When Beomgyu didn’t cough up the goods, Taehyun bartered, “I know you have a pair.”

“How?” But Beomgyu didn’t really want to learn the answer to that. “Fine,” he grunted. He reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled free a pair of tweezers. They were usually reserved for doing emergency surgery on the stalks of lead for his mechanical pencil. He didn’t like getting his fingertips all smudged.

Taehyun wiped the tweezers off on the sleeve of his blazer and then held them up to the light as if to closely examine them.

Heeseung gulped. “Do I need to do anything special?”

Taehyun got up out of his chair to kneel down next to Heeseung on the carpeted floor. “Nah. Just hold still. It won’t hurt. Uhh. Maybe I should get a trash can first.” He stood up again.

Something very minor was bothering Beomgyu about this whole thing and he didn’t figure out what it was until Taehyun came back and started using the tweezers to pluck the tiny black holes from Heeseung’s leg.

Beomgyu turned to Soobin. “Do you know about Riki?”

The blue-haired boy’s utter lack of surprise was an obvious enough answer. “He was one of our first cases.”

Beomgyu watched Taehyun yank one of the vampire bites free. It was surprisingly long and gooey when it wasn’t plugged into Heeseung’s skin. Like a melted gummy worm or something. Beomgyu asked, “Then how come you didn’t take his power like you’re taking Heeseung’s?”

Soobin put a hand on Beomgyu’s shoulder and rubbed gentle circles like he was attempting to calm Beomgyu down. “Reading minds is kind of harmless, don’t you think? Besides, Riki can only do it when he’s seated in front of a chess board and holding a white pawn in his hand. The conditions are extremely specific for a reason we still haven’t figured out.” He motioned to Heeseung, who sucked in air between his teeth as Taehyun started removing another vampire bite. It tugged at his skin and it looked like it hurt but there was no blood. Soobin continued, “But Heeseung’s life is in actual danger. Vampirism is pretty serious and should probably only be considered by someone with the privilege to  _ choose _ how to live in such a way. The whole bursting-into-flames-in-sunlight thing, you know? Can’t take that lightly.” Soobin leaned forward, putting his face close to Beomgyu’s. His eyes were kind and his smile was deep and dimpled and his hair was so so so blue. “That’s why we helped you with the classroom and with the stairs. Those things could have been potentially dangerous if left unchecked.”

“Fair,” Beomgyu said. “I just think it’s weird that Riki gets to keep his magic when Heeseung’s gets taken from him.”

“Was it really Heeseung’s if he got it from a stray dog?”

Ok. Fair. 

Soobin said, “Now that Heeseung has encountered the Uncanny, there’s a chance he’ll develop his own use of magic.” He propped a hand up on Beomgyu’s head and smoothed down a flyaway lock of hair. The gesture was so intimate and yet so casual. “In case you’ve forgotten, we’re all Magic-Users too. You could figure out a way to read minds if you tried hard enough.”

Beomgyu reached up his own hand and propped it on top of Soobin’s blue blue blue hair. “Nah. I don’t wanna do that.” Now that he thought about it, with how specific his magic worked, Riki probably only ever heard his opponent’s next moves in chess and not much else. Wouldn’t that get repetitive? Wouldn’t that get lonely? “I’ll use my magic in a different way,” Beomgyu decided.

  
  
  
  


**Thursday, 9:31 AM.**

In all honesty, Beomgyu was surprised that he didn't start getting cornered and assaulted by nosy personal questions from his classmates until the break between 1st and 2nd period.

He expected it to come much sooner. Like… you know… yesterday. When it had happened.

“Hey.” A short-haired girl he’d never spoken to before approached him in the hallway. “I heard you’re friends with Kang Taehyun now.” Then her stern expression softened with minty cool aloofness. “That’s cool. He’s cool. You’re cool.” And just like that, she walked away.

He hadn’t had an encounter like that since he first joined the Chess Club and some random guy had approached him at his locker and cryptically stated, “I heard you beat Sunghoon,” before turning around and walking away.

Was walking up to people and saying random things just something people did at this school? Were they all NPCs in a video game? Or was there something Uncanny happening? Was the game afoot? Because if the game was afoot, he’d have to track down Taehyun and figure out what the heck unraveling meant.

Hardly a minute later, Beomgyu was approached by another schoolmate whose name he didn’t know. “You’re Taehyun’s new friend, aren’t you? That’s cool. Beomgyu, right? Nice to meet you.” Then the guy walked away. Beomgyu bit his lip. Was Taehyun…  _ cool _ ? Nooooooo. That didn’t seem correct.

Another odd thing occurred when a first year he’d never met handed him a freshly-bought, still-warm cheese bun. “This is for you, Beomgyu.”

Beomgyu eloquently responded, “Uhhh…”

The mildly pudgy girl said, “I heard you hang out with Hueningkai. He helped me shed the mermaid scales that had started growing on my legs. Tell him I said hey.”

Huh? Weird.

“Wait, hold on…” Beomgyu realized that the girl was too far away to hear him but he kept up his end of the conversation anyway. “Are you telling me that those guys aren’t weirdos. They’re  _ popular _ ?”

As if to confirm his suspicions, a second-year who he actually was acquainted with tugged on his sleeve before he could slip into his next class. “You’re friends with Yeonjun, right,” she asked. She pulled something out of her blazer pocket. “If you could give him this before school lets out today, that would be great.” Then, without really waiting around for Beomgyu to accept or deny her favor, she pushed a folded note into his hand and then darted away, cheeks red with mild embarrassment. 

Beomgyu looked down at the notebook paper that was origami-folded into the shape of a heart. An obvious confession letter. Something that was probably too personal for just anyone to hold on to. And she wanted him to deliver it to Yeonjun on her behalf?

Huh. Weeeeeeird. 

Unfortunately, that was not the last of his incredibly difficult problems.

“Hiya!” 

“Jesus,” Beomgyu swore. He whirled around to see Jaeyun standing right behind him. The guy from the other day. The one who claimed he had wings. Another moment where he knew deep down, from the bottom of his heart, that he wasn’t going to like the answer to the question he was about to ask but it was still a moment in which he asked the question regardless, “What do you want from me?”

Jaeyun beamed. Like, his grin could be seen from space. That’s how bright it was. “Did you want to eat lunch with me today? I mean, you kinda whooshed into my secret place the other day so I figured it would only be right if I properly invited you.”

Oh no. It was happening again.

Jaeyun kept on. “I made you a sandwich! I’ll heat it up for you before lunch. You should tell me how you like it.” 

Beomgyu peered around the guy’s broad-shouldered frame. Was there anyone else around he could pretend to know? Did he just make a mad dash for his next class?

Undeterred, Jaeyun boldly continued, “I make all of my sandwiches. Did you know? I get the really good sourdough bread from the shop at the end of my street and then I just go to town. I try to mix things up sometimes. Like, I’ll eat a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich one day and then I’ll do a ham and cheese the next day and then I’ll really get bold and do a  _ turkey _ and cheese the day after that.”

“How western,” was Beomgyu’s only comment.

Jaeyun nodded enthusiastically. “There’s Vegemite as well but I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t start you off with that. Maybe Nutella? No. I don’t really like it enough to buy any. It tastes too much like a dessert to put on a sandwich. Do you think I should make subs? Like… The long, skinny sandwiches? I haven’t had meatballs in a while. I’ll have to look up a recipe.”

He didn’t seem to care at all that the time between classes was winding down. Wasn’t he a first year? He was on the wrong floor. Would he get to class on time? Or did he come all the way up here specifically to track Beomgyu down and sandwich him to death?

“I know people get tired of all of the product placement for Subway in dramas but, like, it’s really good. The food, I mean. Not necessarily the immersion-breaking advertising. I actually didn’t stop to consider if you had any food restrictions. Are you alright with dairy products? Though I guess I should have asked this first.” 

Beomgyu was beyond his threshold. He had to cut this short. “What do you want, Jaeyun?”

Jaeyun let out a tiny little, “Oh,” and his big, expressive face that was so bright and smiley before darkened with surprise so quickly that Beomgyu immediately felt bad. 

Like, the guilt clawed at him. He felt it scratch at his cold, dead heart. Worse than accidentally stepping on a pet’s tail. Beomgyu attempted to smooth things over. “Didn’t mean to cut you off. I just…” Gosh, why was he so  _ nice _ ? “Class is about to start, you know?”

To that, Jaeyun nodded. His smile returned. Just very slowly and not as bright. “Oh yeah. I totally forgot.”

Okaaaay, Beomgyu thought. Maybe the kid was a little charming. Like a puppy or something. Fortunately, Beomgyu couldn’t exactly take him home and ask his mom if they can keep him. “Actually,” said Beomgyu, changing his tune, “I wouldn’t mind eating lunch with you.” Because eating lunch with him meant not having to eat lunch with the others.

Jaeyun squealed and jumped up and down. Like… actually. Legitimately. He flung his arms around Beomgyu and hugged him so tightly that his shoes left the floor.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Beomgyu groaned, sucking in a breath. “Don’t crack a rib, please.”

“Same time, same place,” Jaeyun asked, setting him back down on the floor. “For lunch, I mean. Behind the auditorium, I mean.” He snapped his fingers as something hit him. “Oh yeah, I got so caught up in telling you about sandwiches in general that I didn’t actually tell you about the sandwich that I made you. Do you have anything against bechamel sauce?”

Beomgyu didn’t even know what that was. “Class, remember,” he reminded the guy. “I gotta go.”

“Right, right, right.” Jaeyun let himself be turned around and steered down the hall towards the stairs. “See you later, friend.”

“Yes. Okay. Sure. Gotcha,” Beomgyu told him. He didn’t relax until after Jaeyun gave him a big, sweeping goodbye wave with both arms before disappearing down the stairs. 

Beomgyu stepped down the hall towards his own class, nerves frazzled and skin tingling. Had he been some saint in his past life? Taking in the sick and the lonely and the odd? What did he do to deserve such punishment? 

Oh well. He could just come up with alternative lunch plans, ditch the guy and then spend the remainder of his school life hiding from Jaeyun. No sooner had he come up with a plan did he picture Jaeyun’s big puppy dog eyes and sad ole pout. 

Beomgyu was too nice. “Fine!” He shook a fist up at the ceiling. At God. “I’ll eat lunch with him.” He arrived at his classroom near the end of the hall. In a much lower voice, he added, “I’ll even buy him a slice of cheesecake from the student store on the way.”

Why did everyone want to eat lunch with him?

First Kai and the others. Now this kid.

Why couldn’t he eat lunch with Riki and Sunghoon like usual? They were so  _ quiet _ and Beomgyu hadn’t realized how much of a blessing that was until he met so many people who weren’t quiet. 

But he didn’t get to think about it much longer than that because he couldn’t even sit down at his desk and take out the materials for his class without his classmates crowding around him, grinning excitedly. Fish clamoring around food flakes being dropped into the water.

They all seemed to speak at once.

“Hey, Beomgyu!”

“Morning, Beomgyu.”

“I heard you’re dating Soobin now.”

“ _ The _ Choi Soobin.”

“Lucky.”

“Everyone saw you guys walking to the cafeteria together yesterday.”

“You make a cute couple.”

“I’m so jealous.”

“I’m happy for you guys.”

“Soobin’s so handsome but he always turns everybody who asks him out down. He’s so picky.”

“Hey, Beomgyu. Did you want to hang out after school?”

“Let’s go get boba.”

“Yeah. That’s a good idea!” 

“What about this weekend? You free? I’m throwing a party.”

“Beomgyu?”

It was that crisp, clear, apple cider voice at the end that cut through all of the static noise and made Beomgyu and everyone crowding in around his desk turn to look.

Soobin stood in the doorway of their classroom, tall and spiffy and handsome and blue-haired. Blue-haired!!!! For real, why did no one else make a big deal about that?

“Yeah, Soobin,” Beomgyu asked, slightly startled.

Soobin gave him a smile. “Can you come with me? I need you.”

Everyone gasped or giggled or blushed.

Beomgyu gulped nervously, “Right now?” It was probably some Uncanny thing that they needed to solve. But even if it was, why would they need  _ him _ ? “Like…  _ Immediately _ -immediately?”

Soobin nodded. Firmly but not unkindly, he said, “Yeah. Now. Let’s go. It’s top priority.”

He was saying that so confidently. Even though the tardy bell had just rung. Even though Beomgyu’s teacher had just asked everyone to get to their seats so that they could start. Soobin had effectively just asked him to skip class. Right in front of everyone.

Beomgyu stood up. “Okay. Let’s go.” And before the teacher could call him back to his desk, before the gasps and whispers of his classmates could get to him and make him reconsider, Beomgyu rushed up the aisle of desks, grabbed Soobin’s outstretched hand and let himself be pulled out into the hallway. Swept away. 

Rescued.

Freed.

The giddiness and joy that raced through Beomgyu’s veins was almost childish as the two of them darted down the emptying halls, shoes squeaking on the tile as they raced each other to the staircase, hand in hand.

It wasn’t until Soobin playfully shushed him that Beomgyu realized he’d been laughing the whole time. Laughing like he was so happy he could die.

Far enough away from the classrooms, they slowed down and caught their breaths. They were headed towards the building’s main hall, Beomgyu realized. The main doors. They were really about to _ leave school _ . Just like that. And as exciting as that was, even a task like walking now felt difficult and extreme. Beomgyu’s nervous heart hammered so heavily in his chest that he was certain Soobin could hear its thudding echoes in the quiet, empty, freshly-mopped hall. But it wasn’t even the thought of going outside when he should be in class that had him so high-strung.

“My classmates think we’re dating,” said Beomgyu as they turned the last corner and approached the school’s front doors.

Soobin looked over at him, mouth wide open in surprise. “They only  _ think _ we’re dating? Shouldn’t they  _ know _ ?”

Huh?

“Didn’t we start dating yesterday,” Soobin asked.

That was news to Beomgyu! “You asked me out?”

“Weren’t you the one who asked  _ me _ out?”

Beomgyu snorted back a giggle. “I asked if you were okay with people thinking that we’re dating.”

“And I said I was cool with that.”

Ahhh. So were they dating? Was that how it happened? “I don’t even have your number.”

“We can trade contacts in a bit.”

“We barely know each other.”

“Isn’t dating all about getting to know someone?”

“But you’re cool and I’m not.”

“Who says you’re not cool?”

“I don’t even… I wasn’t…” But Beomgyu couldn’t even come up with anything else. Had Soobin actually been serious about the dating thing? Then again, Beomgyu had never been asked out by anyone before so he wasn’t sure how it was supposed to happen. What steps he was supposed to take. It always seemed so big and dramatic and life-changing in the TV shows he watched. There was always music swelling up in the background. There was always some kind of fireworks moment. But with Soobin, it was just like any other day. Like it was natural. Beomgyu turned to face forward instead of up at Soobin’s face. He realized why this bothered him. “I thought dating would be a bigger deal than that. Than this.”

Soobin tilted his head, “Should it be?” Then he asked, “Should we  _ not _ date? I don’t like anyone else at the moment. Do you like someone else?”

And that made Beomgyu shake his head. “No. Not currently. You’re my only crush.”

“Then what’s wrong with the two of us dating?”

Beomgyu didn’t really have an argument for that. It’s not so much that he didn’t want to date Soobin and more so that he wasn’t sure why Soobin would want to date  _ him _ .

“Let’s just have fun,” Soobin said. And maybe that explained everything.

Beomgyu pushed open the school’s front doors and the two of them stepped outside. The sky was a brilliant, gorgeous, lush shade of blue. Like tourmaline. And the clouds were stark white and wispy and soft. Like lace. 

There was just something about green grass and blue sky that was pretty nifty. 

You just couldn’t get that kind of thing indoors.

The two of them didn’t go too much farther. In fact, they didn’t even leave campus. Soobin guided Beomgyu towards a big, old, leafy oak tree and in its dappled shade were the other members of the Uncanny Magic-Users Club. 

Kai sat at the base of the tree, arms stretched behind his head, face tilted back towards a ray of sun.

Taehyun sat near him, his special book open on his lap, his finger running over the smooth, semi-glossy pages as he read.

Yeonjun was stretched out on the grass, limbs spread wide like a starfish. Once again, he chose not to wear his uniform properly. Or, more accurately, he was wearing it correctly… just… Well, it was hard to explain. It was late April. The weather was balmy and warm and maybe a little uncomfortably humid. Oddly so for this time of year. But today was the day out of all days that Yeonjun chose to wear the orange and white sweatsuit the athletic teams wore in winter. He even had the hood up and over his head, cinched tight around his oval face despite the sweat gathering on his nose.

Soobin guided Beomgyu down to a nice spot on the ground and they relaxed with their legs crossed, arms bridging the gap between them, hands clasped tight.

“A classmate gave this to me,” Beomgyu said. “She wanted me to give this to you.” He tossed the origami heart through the air.

Maybe it was because Yeonjun was good at sports but he raised an arm and caught it without looking at it. Then he balanced one of the pointy bits on the tip of his finger and spun it around like a basketball. Then the heart drifted up and up into the air, spinning like one of those old-fashioned propellor toys. Which was… impossible. No. It was Uncanny.

“It’s not falling apart,” Yeonjun commented. He twitched his fingers and the floating heart sailed up higher into the air. “Her feelings must be sincere.”

“Are you going to open it,” Beomgyu asked him. Too late, he realized that he’d left the cheese bun he’d been gifted on his desk. That’s how big of a hurry he’d been in. His stomach growled. “Are you going to read it?”

Yeonjun didn’t lift his head up off of the grass. “Nah. I already know what it says.”

“Are you going to reply to her?” Beomgyu didn’t know why this was so important to him.

“Sure,” Yeonjun said. “Why not?” He flicked his fingers and the notebook paper heart turned solid red as it twirled through the air like a feather. “Looks like we’ll be a good match.”

So maybe dating wasn’t a huge, monumental thing. Maybe it was just something that happened.

Beomgyu looked over at Soobin. “Soobin and I are dating now.”

“I thought you started dating yesterday,” asked Kai.

Right. There was that.

“I just felt like I should officially announce it,” Beomgyu said.

“You’ll be a good match,” Taehyun said. “I looked it up in the charts.”

Beomgyu looked down at where he and Soobin clasped hands. Flowers were growing up around the two of them. He wasn’t sure when that started happening but it was now a thing. It didn’t matter what kind. Tulips, lilies, peonies, azaleas. Even a sunflower or two. Red and yellow and pink and white and purple. Flowers of all kinds, flowers that weren’t even in bloom at this time of year, just sprang up out of the earth around them, petals facing the sun, and no one thought that was weird at all.

Because it wasn’t weird. It was just a thing that happened.

Because these guys weren’t weirdos. They were just people. 

Friends.

When a few seconds of comfortable silence ticked by and they all stacked up and turned into a solid minute of quiet, Beomgyu spoke up. “So what’s the problem we’re trying to solve?”

Kai looked over at him. “Hmm?”

“Is it something with the tree?” Beomgyu pointed up. “Or is it the gazebo playing tricks?” He pointed to the left.

“No. Nothing’s Uncanny about the tree or the gazebo,” stated Kai. “Not currently.”

Beomgyu huffed, “Then what big case are we trying to crack today?” Oh. He just said ‘we.’ He just acknowledged that he was part of their group now. Uh oh. He was done for. He was a goner.

“The only question that needs answering is how much sunlight we can absorb between now and lunch,” Taehyun announced. “Like photosynthesis.”

Now there were butterflies. Not in Beomgyu’s stomach but actual butterflies. White and yellow and blue and green like jewels. Striped and spotted and plain. They came out of nowhere. Out of thin air. They fluttered around the flowers. One landed on Taehyun’s wrist. One settled on Kai’s shoe.

“What are we trying to solve, then,” Beomgyu asked, impatient.

“Oh, we aren’t trying to  _ solve _ anything,” said Yeonjun. He had closed his eyes and now he looked like he was a few seconds away from a nap. “We’re just trying to relax.”

Huh? Weiiiiird.

“This is what you needed me for?” Beomgyu looked over at Soobin.

“Everyone needs a break,” was Soobin’s response.

“So we’re skipping class… just to… hang out,” questioned Beomgyu, full of skepticism.

And Taehyun answered, “Yeah. We do that.” He shrugged his shoulders but didn’t look up from his book. “It’s time to unravel.”

“Lazing around is a club activity,” Kai added. “Or, should I say, recharging our magic is a club activity.”

Beomgyu didn’t have an argument for that. Perhaps he didn’t need one. He probably should have joined the Debate Club instead of the Chess Club with the way he liked to question everyone’s intentions. But… this was fine, he decided. This was good. Magic was all about feeling, not thinking. So Soobin said. 

Beomgyu turned to look at Soobin. “Are you doing this,” he asked. “With the flowers and the butterflies and--Jesus Christ--the bees?”

“No. Are you?”

“I have no idea,” Beomgyu responded.

Kai shushed them.

The five of them fell back into silence.

Soobin had his eyes closed, enjoying the warmth and glory of the sunlight on his face. His lashes were long and pretty, casting tiny little shadows beneath his eyes. His cheeks were rosy from the heat and his lips looked soft and sweet and pink. He stayed so still that flowers sprouted and blossomed around his legs, stems and leaves snaked up his arms. More and more and more butterflies settled on his shoulders and on the top of his head like he was a Disney princess or something. Like he was Snow White.

A strikingly beautiful blue butterfly settled right on the tip of Soobin’s nose.

He looked like a painting, Beomgyu thought. A really pretty painting that should go in an art museum.

If Beomgyu was any good at drawing, he’d draw Soobin.

Instead, he was only good at chess. He’d win a game of chess in honor of Soobin’s prettiness.

That reminded Beomgyu of something.

“Hey, Soobin,” he half-whispered, so as not to disturb the tranquil quiet beneath the tree, between the five of them. So as not to spook the butterflies.

Soobin hummed, “Hmm?”

“How do you not get in trouble with any of the teachers for having blue hair?”

Yeonjun sat up from where he was resting. Kai stopped watching a bird build a nest on one of the higher tree branches. Taehyun ceased reading his book. They all swung their heads in Beomgyu’s direction. Confused. Curious. Intrigued.

Soobin opened his big brown eyes and turned to look Beomgyu in the face. With that brilliant smile of his, he warmly asked, covered in butterflies and surrounded by flowers and painted by sunlight and shadows, “Wait… I have blue hair?”

A hummingbird danced around his head.

  
  
  
  


**3:08 PM.**

It was strange how the things Beomgyu used to dread were so quickly becoming the things he was looking forward to.

The things he was anticipating.

The things he was  _ enjoying _ .

Example One: just yesterday, spotting Yeonjun and Taehyun chatting in the hallway would have upset him. He would have thought  _ get a load of these clowns _ , and then turned to walk in the opposite direction, hoping he wouldn’t get spotted by them. Seeing them would have set him scurrying into the nearest hiding spot. Would have sent him running like they were after him. But, today, he  _ waved _ ! And they  _ waved back _ ! Like the two of them were officially friends of his. Like the two of them weren’t people he was totally embarrassed to be around or get seen with out in public or something crazy like that.

Who would have thought?

Example B: Jaeyun demanding Beomgyu eat lunch with him sounded like a death sentence. It sounded like subjecting himself to cruel and unusual punishment. He’d rather do  _ anything else _ , was his thought. But after actually eating lunch with the kid, Beomgyu discovered that it… wasn’t… all that bad? The cement steps behind the auditorium were warm from sitting beneath the sun and, when you relaxed and gave it time to sink in, the view was actually pretty nice. The steps overlooked a small garden which was awesome because, like, Beomgyu was  _ totally _ into nature now. On top of that, it turned out that Jaeyun could talk about something other than sandwiches. Though he still spoke at length about them. (“I don’t like my cheese to be completely melted, you see. I mean, what’s the fun in it being all goopy and dripping all over the place and potentially getting all stuck to the plastic wrap? You shouldn’t heat the cheese too much. There’s gotta be a bit of structure left to it. Something to chew on. It’s why I’m super picky about how long I toast my bread. I have it down to a science. Like, the bread can’t be totally crunchy and crispy. Otherwise it’s like… You may as well eat pita bread instead of honey wheat, you know? There’s gotta be some softness to savor. Beomgyu, are you listening?”)

Example Tres: three days ago, if Soobin walked by him in the hallway, Beomgyu may not have even noticed him. Correction. He probably  _ would _ have noticed Soobin’s Sonic The Hedgehog hair but he surely would have regarded it with suspicion and confusion as opposed to wonder and curiosity and maybe even envy. He just would have gone  _ huh, weiiiiird _ , and then went about his day. But now… 

But now--

Beomgyu turned his head. He’d seen a flash of all-too-familiar color out of the corner of his eye.

School had let out for the day and Beomgyu had been on his way down the stone path to the school’s big front gates to go home when he spotted that wonderful head of blue hair off to the side. 

Soobin was sitting in the grass, cross-legged, all of his attention poured into whatever object he had clasped in his hands.

It hit Beomgyu a little late that Soobin was sitting in the same place he had seen all four members of the Uncanny Magic-Users Club the other day, huddled together and whispering about a… something-something egg? Gosh. He already forgot. 

Beomgyu stepped off the path and into the grass. When he realized that he was being sneaky for no reason, he relaxed and stepped forward with more confidence. “Soobin,” he wondered, attempting to peer over Soobin’s broad shoulder. “What are you doing over here?” 

Soobin didn’t even look up at him. He reached out a hand, caught Beomgyu by the wrist and then pulled and pulled until Beomgyu got the hint and sat down on the grass in front of him. Soobin’s hand held onto his for a moment. His long and slim fingers traced the lines on Beomgyu’s palm before letting go and drawing back. “What does this look like to you,” Soobin asked. He glanced up just long enough to meet Beomgyu’s gaze, just long enough to smile at him, before he returned his attention to the large stone in his hands.

“What do you mean what does it look like,” Beomgyu asked. 

On the path, their schoolmates laughed and joked and horsed around, the tittering sound of their joy as bright as birdsong. 

“I meant what I mean,” Soobin replied. “What does this look like to you?” He held up the stone.

Beomgyu squinted at it. It wasn’t really a stone in the ‘it’s a big rock’ sort of way. But stone as in precious stone. The thing was teardrop-shaped and jewel-like. Fiery red in color. Multifaceted like a ruby. It looked like it was hot, like it would burn, but when Beomgyu reached out a hand, the surface was only slightly warm. “It looks like a gem,” he announced. Then he shrank back and choked on a gasp, startled. “And I just felt something inside it move.”

Soobin was not surprised. He said, “Good.” Like a doctor getting back the exact results they expected.

Beomgyu connected the dots. He pointed a finger. “This is the phoenix egg.” It’s what the guys had been muttering about the other day.

“And it’s about to hatch. We’ve been keeping an eye on it since last month.” Soobin looked up at him. His smile broadened enough for the pits of his dimples to crease his cheeks. “I’m glad you’re here, Beomgyu. The others had plans and couldn’t come over here to watch.”

“I’m glad I get to see it,” said Beomgyu, smiling back. He wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to see what a phoenix looked like. Like, wow. Talk about an accomplishment. He dropped his gaze from Soobin’s handsome face to the egg in his hands. “But why did you ask me what it looked like when there’s no way to mistake something so pretty?”

Soobin replied, “I kind of had to ask. Just to be sure. Just to gauge things. Matters of the Uncanny already bend the rules of the world so I just needed to know if we were on the same page.” He took a moment to collect his thoughts. He dragged a finger over the surface of the jewel-like egg and Beomgyu watched as the surface distended as if whatever was inside were about to pop out. “To people who don’t know anything about magic, to people who haven’t been exposed to much, this just looks like a big rock. Can you imagine?”

Beomgyu got the feeling that Soobin was attempting to make some big, sweeping statement. But… “I don’t follow.”

“Neither do I, to be honest,” Soobin chuckled. 

Beomgyu snorted back a laugh. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I can’t imagine this looking like nothing more than a rock.” Soobin shook his head forcefully. His blue hair swung back and forth across his forehead, shimmering and sparkling in the waning afternoon sunlight. “I guess the Uncanny is all about perspective. In the grand scheme of things, I’ve really only been neck-deep in things like this for just a few years but, even then, I already can’t wrap my head around living without Uncanny magic.”

Beomgyu still wasn’t sure he got where this was going. “Keep going,” he prompted. “What do you mean?”

“Gosh, it’s such a simple concept in my head but trying to explain it to someone else turns everything all muddy.”

“It’s okay, Soobin. I like talking to you so it’s fine. Take your time.” 

Soobin nodded. He pursed his lips like a nervous habit. Bit at his bottom lip like he was hesitating. Then he plunged forward in his theorizing, “It’s like trying to imagine a world where yellow isn’t my favorite color. It’s like trying to imagine a world where I’m no good at archery.”

“You’re good at archery?”

“I’m passable.” Soobin giggled. And, maybe, just maybe, Beomgyu’s heart jumped at the sound. “But do you get what I mean now? I can’t imagine a world without Uncanny magic. I can’t imagine being someone who looks at this and only sees a rock.”

In near-perfect timing, the egg in his hands trembled. A hairline crack appeared across the shimmering surface. Then it grew and grew like delicate glass breaking.

“I think I get it now,” said Beomgyu. “Tell me if I’m wrong. It’s like… It’s like learning something new, like a skill, and then wondering how there was ever a time where you couldn’t do it.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Soobin agreed.

“Learning the meaning of a new word and being unable to to understand how no one else knows the definition. Or discovering some indie band and being unable to figure out why music so good isn’t more popular.” Beomgyu snapped his fingers as more and more examples cropped up in his head. “Like Jaeyun being completely incapable of accepting that other people can’t differentiate between three kinds of cheese through taste alone.”

Soobin nodded slowly. Understanding but not understanding. “You’ve got it.”

“And it’s like me… Right now… Being unable to accept how  _ no one else _ can see that your hair is as blue as an anime character.”

“That’s still something I’m trying to figure out,” said Soobin. “I swear I’ve never dyed my hair.”

The egg vibrated. Both boys dipped their heads to look down at it. The egg shook and cracked and trembled. The red, ruby-like surface broke away in glittering chunks. A tiny little flare of fire whooshed out of the egg and the two of them pulled their faces away to protect their eyebrows. Then the egg went oddly still.

Soobin’s expression got serious and he looked up and stared into Beomgyu’s eyes. “I can’t imagine being someone who looks at you and isn’t immediately attracted.”

And Beomgyu was paying so much attention that he, funnily enough, wasn’t paying  _ enough _ attention. Had Soobin just called him attractive?

The egg in Soobin’s hands shook again. More chunks fell away, the hole at the top growing larger and larger. They could hear the bird inside now.  _ Cheep-cheep-cheep _ , it went. The sound was musical and flighty, like stray notes from a clarinet.

“And I can’t imagine,” Soobin continued, “not being your boyfriend.”

Oh.

Ohhhhhhh.

Yeah, this was definitely one of those huge, life-altering, shell-breaking moments in which the laws of the world shifted in so profound a manner that the only way to react was  _ oh _ . “Oh,” Beomgyu squeaked out.

The phoenix broke free from its egg.

  
  
  
  


**Friday, 12:21 AM.**

Was Soobin’s hair blue because he was magical? 

Or was he magical because his hair was blue?

It was such a big, huge, fantastical, mega-important question and Beomgyu couldn’t decide which question to ask. It was like the great philosophical debate on whether the chicken came first or the egg came first. If the egg came first, who gave birth to it? If the chicken came first, where was it birthed from? If Taehyun’s book was super mega powerful with all of the answers scribed in its magical, glowing pages… then, who gave it to him? Was Soobin’s hair blue so that he could dally in Uncanny tomfoolery? Or did messing around with Uncanny such-and-such turn his hair blue?

The questions plagued Beomgyu’s mind even as he texted Soobin late into the night, back and forth, back and forth, curled up in bed with his window open, a cool breeze billowing past his linen curtains from outside.

Apparently, Beomgyu was the only one who could see that Soobin’s hair was blue. Not just out of the five of them but out of everyone. To anyone else looking at him, Soobin’s hair was as black as raven feathers so why was it such a bright and vibrant blue to Beomgyu? Especially since no one else at school had such bright, sparkling hair. What was the reason?  _ Was _ there a reason? Really, he could come up with any explanation he saw fit and no one, literally no one, not a soul on the planet, could tell him he was wrong. 

That just meant it was even tougher to come up with an explanation that he liked. Or, rather, it was tough coming up with an explanation that he wanted to believe was right.

Was it Soobin’s hair? Or was it Beomgyu’s eyes?

Gosh. This kind of thing would keep Beomgyu up all night. Even as he laid there and replied to another of Soobin’s texts with an enthusiastic wall of text, he knew that sleep would evade him until he came up with a satisfactory answer. He wouldn’t be able to rest. He wouldn’t be able to count a single sheep or catch a single z. It would keep him up all night. He just knew it!

Soobin’s hair was blue because he was the joy and the laughter. Powerpuffs save the day, man.

Soobin’s hair was blue like aquamarine because Beomgyu was a Pisces and that was his birth stone.

Soobin’s hair was blue like the sky in the afternoon. Precious and sparkling. Because Soobin was amazing and not weird at all like Beomgyu had thought.

Yeah. That was it. 

Beomgyu liked that explanation best and no one could tell him any different.  _ You’re amazing and super cool and apparently my boyfriend now. That’s why you look blue to me. _ Well, that’s what he wanted to say. He typed the word ‘You’re’ into his chat with Soobin and then prematurely hit send because he fell asleep before he could finish his thought.

Soobin must have known what he meant anyways. He replied ‘I know.’ And then ‘Good night, Gyu’ right after.

  
  
  
  


**2:05 PM.**

“Oh,” said Beomgyu, propping his hands up on his hips. This was another of those huge, poignant moments. “Oh.” He blinked. “Now I know why you said this was a top priority.”

“The game’s afoot,” said Taehyun.

It was time to unravel. Beomgyu  _ finally _ knew what that meant.

“I swear these things usually don’t happen to me,” said Kai from way up on the ceiling. “I’m usually a bit more grounded than this. A touch more down-to-Earth. You feel me?”

“We’ll get you down,” Soobin stated. “That’s a given.”

“Is Yeonjun on the way,” asked Taehyun. “We need all five members of the club for this.”

“He said he was exactly thirteen seconds away,” Beomgyu replied, stashing his phone in his pocket. “But who knows what he actually meant by that.”

“One thing I’m thankful for is that I’m not afraid of heights.” Kai shrugged. “But I will admit that, from where I’m standing,  _ you guys _ are the ones who are up high. You’ve got a leaf in your hair. By the way. Beomgyu, I mean.”

Beomgyu raised a hand. It took a little bit of fumbling around through his curls, but he found the offending leaf. Small. Partially snapped off. Brown. Some withered remnant from winter. “I haven’t even been outside. Where’d this even come from,” he asked, staring at the thing as he held it between two fingers. “Please don’t tell me it’s been in my hair since this morning and no one’s told me.”

Kai shrugged again. “I couldn’t tell you. I just saw it from here. That’s all.”

The story was that Kai had been on his way to his last class of the day when gravity sneezed or hiccuped or coughed or something and he wound up walking on the ceiling. He’d attempted to go to class as usual, had crawled through the door and sat on the ceiling tiles above his desk and everything, but his teacher told him to stop fooling around and sent him out of the room.

“He told me not to come back until I could behave like a normal person,” said Kai. “Looks like I’m excused for the rest of the year.”

It did make Beomgyu wonder what Kai looked like to people who weren’t privy to Uncanny things. Though, just like Soobin had said earlier that day, Beomgyu couldn’t even imagine  _ not _ being able to experience the Uncanny.

“Yo,” Yeonjun shouted as he came around the corner.

Everyone turned to look at him.

Beomgyu wasn’t even surprised at how Yeonjun was wearing his uniform today. It wasn’t…. Well, it wasn’t wrong or inappropriate. It was just Yeonjun. Instead of the typical, normative checkered slacks, Yeonjun had opted to wear the uniform skirt, folded at the hem to be quite short actually, along with a pair of calf-high stockings, exposing his volleyball-bruised knees and thighs. 

Beomgyu was glad that Yeonjun wore whatever he wanted to wear. Nothing weird about that.

“How do you think we should get him down,” Taehyun asked Yeonjun.

Yeonjun hummed as he thought about it. “Can we stand on each other’s shoulders and pull him down?”

“Surely, we could use a ladder like civilized folk.”

“Hmm. I was thinking he could do a few cartwheels,” Soobin pondered. “Maybe he’ll flip back into regular gravity.”

“And risk damaging the ceiling tiles?”

“Dude, just crawl up the lockers and get back here!”

“Or just jump really high. There’s a chance gravity will switch over like in a video game or something.”

“Maybe,” Taehyun suggested, “we chuck our backpacks up there and he grabs hold of them and the added weight will send him back down this way.”

“We’ll catch you, of course,” said Yeonjun. “Though that depends on how fast you fall and if you warn us in advance.”

Kai made himself comfortable on the ceiling, legs spread out in front of him. He pulled a small bag of candy from his blazer pocket. “You don’t have to be in such a rush, guys. I’m vibing.” He dropped a few, but instead of falling down on the club member’s heads like regular gravity would have you thinking, the M&Ms landed on Kai’s lap or rolled along the ceiling or made weird noises as they pinged and bounced off the ceiling lights. “I’ll just hang out.”

“If you walk out of the building, will you fall up into the sky,” Yeonjun had to ask.

“He’d technically be falling down into the sky,” corrected Taehyun, fishing his book out of his backpack.

Soobin reached out and grabbed Beomgyu’s hand. It was almost second nature how easily their fingers intertwined. It was almost dangerous how comfortable Beomgyu felt holding Soobin’s hand. Soobin asked, “What about you? What do you think we should do?”

“I get to suggest something,” Beomgyu asked, shocked.

“Yeah. All club members get a say,” said Kai from the ceiling.

“Well, then,” Beomgyu said, “gather around because I have a plan.”


End file.
